TABLE OF CONTENTS CMMI was developed to provide a single model to be used by organizations pursuing enterprise-wide process improvement. It provides needed guidance for integrating systems and software development activities. It supports the coordination of multidisciplined activities that are or may be required to successfully build a project. It is also being discovered that these CMMI -based processes can be translated into business processes for other organizational departments such as human resources, finance, marketing, computer services, and contract management.
Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, various standards governing the processes of developing products or product components have existed. There were government standards, industry standards, corporate standards, business unit standards, and project standards. Interface standards were established to ensure that suppliers developing open systems product lines would indeed develop compatible product components. As software intensive systems grew in size and complexity and as the demands on system performance rose in general, meeting customer requirements became more difficult. Nowhere was this seen more clearly than in the United States Department of Defense (DoD).
Large defense contractors built systems that did not meet either some or all of the specifications or even the intended use of the product. The defense contractors offered to improve the systems they had developed and delivered in exchange for a long-standing maintenance contract. This put the DoD in a difficult position. Either it had to contract out to maintain the large volume of different hardware and...
