Capability Maturity Model® for Software (SW-CMM®)

The Capability Maturity Model for Software (CMM or SW-CMM) is a model for judging the maturity of the software processes of an organisation and for identifying the key practices that are required to increase the maturity of these processes.

The SW-CMM has been developed by the software community with the guidance of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and covers practices for planning, engineering, and managing development and maintenance activities. When followed, these key practices improve the ability of organisations to meet goals for cost, schedule, functionality, and product quality. The goal is to improve efficiency, return on investment, and effectiveness thus passing quality and savings onto the customer.

The Software CMM has become a de facto standard for assessing and improving software processes. Through the SW-CMM, the SEI and community have put in place an effective means for modelling, defining, and measuring the maturity of the processes used by software professionals.

By focussing on a limited set of activities and working aggressively toward them an organisation can steadily improve its software process to enable continuous and lasting gain in software development.

A self-assessment approach is applied to provide an accurate picture of the strengths and weaknesses of the organisation's current software process, using the CMM as a reference model. The following diagram of the five maturity levels highlights the primary process changes made at each level:

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