Developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), the CMMI characterizes the maturity of an organization's development processes. The "I" stands for "Integration", and indicates that the CMMI does not apply to only software. Rather, it is an integrated model that embraces all development including software engineering, systems engineering, supplier sourcing and integrated product and process development.
There are two representations of the CMMI; Staged and Continuous.
The Staged representation of the CMMI identifies five process maturity levels, from Level 1 "Initial" to Level 5 "Optimizing". At each maturity level, a number of process areas represent the critical issues that must be under control for the organization to achieve that level.
The Staged representation of the CMMI acknowledges that you can’t do it all at once. There are simply too many issues to address, and many of them rely on others; so the Staged representation identifies a path of increasing maturity. For example:
The Continuous representation of the CMMI quantifies the Capability Level of each Process Area. It allows an organization to address the Process Areas in whatever order makes sense for them. In the Continuous representation, an organization might have a high Capability Level for some Process Areas, while still having a much lower Capability Level for others.
The CMMI is not a process you can simply implement. It is a guidebook to help you navigate the difficult path from ad-hoc software development to highly effective, mature software processes.
Many of ASK Process’s consulting, training and other services revolve around the principles embodied in the CMMI.