TABLE OF CONTENTS The merger of Systems Engineering and Software Engineering CMM and process improvement ideas has resulted in the development of CMMI . This chapter provides a brief over-view of the systems engineering and software engineering sources that were merged to develop CMM Integration or CMMI . In addition, this chapter stresses the importance of engineering systems think, which seems to have gotten lost over the years when the industry focus has predominantly been on the artistic side of software engineering.
In the mid-1980s it became apparent to the United States Department of Defense (DoD) that the myriad of systems that were being developed for defense applications were becoming software intensive, were not meeting the established requirements, and were rapidly becoming cost-prohibitive.
The Software Engineering Institute (SEI), as a part of Carnegie Mellon University, was established in 1984 as a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) with the mission to provide leadership in advancing the state of the practice of software engineering to improve the quality of systems that are dependent on software.
Early questionnaires and model beginnings focused predominantly on software engineering processes. Capability Maturity Model (CMM ) for Software v1.0, released in August 1991, strongly referenced the link to the overall system and the requirements from which the software developers were supposed to work. These requirements were referred to as "systems engineering requirements allocated to software." As CMM for Software started to grow in popularity in the early 1990s, the parts...
