1. Introduction

Recently, the process assessment and improvement of the development organization that uses the 3rd edition of ISO9001 (abbreviated as ISO9001:2000)1 or Capability Maturity Model (abbreviated as CMM)2 ^,3 attract the attention of the IT industries. As the background, there are problems with delivery time and quality of the software products which have become large-scaled and diversified. If the delivery period of the software product is missed, it becomes outdated. Moreover, the delivery delay will lead to immediate budget deficiencies. Further, the quality problems after delivery not only presses profits, but also makes customers lose trust in us. In the worst case, the company might go out of business.

So, in our company, the process improvement activities based on the CMM are tackled at the shift timing to the ISO9001:2000. Now, we are performing the improvement activities according to the following procedures:

1. The objective analysis of process, and judging the degree of capability maturity level.

2. The extraction of strong and weak points, and those improvement proposals for the process.

3. The document generation of the best process procedures in the current level.

4. The practical-use trial in actual projects.

This chapter briefly describes the CMM used for the software process improvement in Sec.