Project-specific process tailoring falls within Organizational Process Definition (OPD), a CMMI-DEV level 3 process area. The purpose of OPD is to establish and maintain the overall organization’s processes.  This include definition of processes (based on organization’s process requirements), establishment of organization’s process architecture (how processes relate to each other to best suit the organization’s structure and environments), and definition of tailoring guidelines and procedures. OPD has one specific goal SG 1 Establish Organizational Process Assets, which in turn, has six practices

SP 1.1 Establish Standard Processes

SP 1.2 Establish Lifecycle Model Description

SP 1.3 Establish Tailoring Criteria and Guideline

SP 1.4 Establish the Organization’s Measurement Repository

SP 1.5 Establish the Organization’s Process Asset Library

SP 1.6 Establish Work Environment Standards

In this post, I am only going to get into the details of SP 1.3, but I will talk about other specific practices of this process area in future posts.  Also, I really want to do a post on CMMI level 3 in general.  For me this is the most interesting CMMI level, as it’s so process-focused.

As I have mentioned in my previous post, process tailoring is the process by which organization’s set of standard process are adjusted to better suit a specific development project. In CMMI terminology, organization’s set of standard processes (OSSP) are tailored into a defined process (a suitable process for a project).  More specifically this practice requires that tailoring to start by selecting standard processes–to be tailored–based on defined criteria, adjustments to the selected processes be made based on well defined tailoring guidelines, and defined procedures followed for any deviation from tailoring guidelines.

This may be too formal and demanding for most organizations, but is very beneficial for mature process-centric organizations.   Keep in mind that tools, such as IRIS, automate many aspects of tailoring, such as creations and management of tailoring guidelines and enforcement of the tailoring procedures, hence, substantially reducing the overhead involved.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 4:48 pm and is filed under CMMI, Tailoring. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.