In an earlier post, I mentioned that one my favorite CMMI phrase is “Say what you do; Do what you say; Prove it”. The “prove it” part of this phrase is especially important during the Standard CMMI Appraisal Method for Process Improvement (SCAMPI) A.  SCAMPI A provides maturity rating, and traditionally in preparation for it an organization spends hundreds (in some cases thousand) of tedious hours compiling, verifying and cataloging paper-based compliance evidence.

An integrated application lifecycle management (ALM) system, such as Microsoft VSTS, substantially reduces this burden by digitizing the majority of the required evidence, and making it accessible from a single portal (SharePoint in the case of VSTS). This portal goes beyond paper-based documents. It provides bi-directional traceability and search functionality. Moreover, the generation of the evidence documentation is automated.

In a very interesting case, an organization, utilizing VSTS, was able of to achieve CMMI maturity level 2 in an six months.

As a side note.  I strongly believe that CMMI is not just for the organization who intend to get an official rating.  Any organization, regardless of size, can greatly benefit from CMMI best practices.  These best practices are the result of over a decade work by some of the industries best minds.  They are quantitatively improved and empirically validated.  I feel, this has much more merit than unverified (latest fad) concepts introduced by methodology theorists.

My advice is not to view CMMI not just as a certification mechanism, rather adopt parts of CMMI that are relevant and beneficial to your organization.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 28th, 2009 at 4:00 pm and is filed under CMMI, Microsoft. 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.