This chapter discusses the Software Engineering Institute's (SEI's) defined approaches to CMMI -based appraisals. Appraisals, assessments, and evaluations are by no means a new subject. There are a number of appraisal methods ^[1] that have been developed to measure and evaluate an organization against the family of Capability Maturity Models (CMMs) in addition to other models and standards. A community of assessors and evaluators has grown around these methods. The CMMI product suite introduces some new concepts, but mostly builds on the history of these previous methods and the best practices of the assessor and evaluator community.

The SEI has released two guiding documents for CMMI assessments:

1. Appraisal Requirements for CMMI (ARC): contains the requirements for three classes of appraisal methods Class A, Class B, and Class C. These requirements are the rules for defining each class of appraisal method.

2. Standard CMMI Appraisal Method for Process Improvement (SCAMPI) Method Description Document (MDD): currently the only approved Class A appraisal method.

This chapter is based on version 1.1 of both the ARC and the SCAMPI MDD that were released in December 2001.

We need to emphasize one point: SCAMPI is currently the only approved CMMI Class A Appraisal Method. That is, SCAMPI satisfies all the requirements of an ARC Class A Appraisal Method and has been approved by the SEI. ^[2] There are three classes of CMMI Appraisal Methods: Class A, Class B, and Class C. We emphasize this point because we have heard and seen numerous references to...