Improving the Software Process

The Capability Maturity Model
Guidelines for improving the Software Process
Mark C Paulk, Charles V Weber, Bill Curtis, Mary Berth Chrissis
Pearson Education Asia
Price: Rs 295/-
Available at: The Computer Bookshop. Tel: 022-2070989

SEI-CMM Level 5. It’s perhaps the most coveted certification for the software community. Over two dozen Indian firms have it and many more strive for it. The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) is a framework 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 initiative for CMM came from the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. But the emergence of this framework is really the combined judgement of literally hundreds of experienced engineers.

This book integrates and elaborates the description of the CMM and how to interpret its practices. It contains the text of the key practices from Paul 93b a technical report that forms the basis of CMM. The first half consists of chapters describing the evolution of the model, the concepts of software process maturity, the structure of the model, how to interpret and use the CMM, and a case study. The second part consists of the key practices of the CMM, which describe the software management engineering practices of a maturing software process.

However, don’t expect to read about all the work being done by SEI’s Software Process Program. You’ll have to check elsewhere if you are looking for in-depth information on SEI’s work on software process definition, measurement, and organisational change.

Software technology continues to evolve and so we can expect the software process to evolve at an equivalent rate, writes Watts Humphrey in the Foreword. And so, this book is targeted at anyone involved in improving the software process, including members of appraisal teams, members of software engineering process groups, software managers, and software practitioners.