Capability Maturity Model Integration

Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a process level improvement training and appraisal program. Administered by the CMMI Institute, a subsidiary of ISACA, it was developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). It is required by many DoD and U.S. Government contracts, especially in software development. CMU claims CMMI can be used to guide process improvement across a project, division, or an entire organization. CMMI defines the following maturity levels for processes: Initial, Managed and Defined. Currently supported is CMMI Version 1.3. CMMI is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by CMU.

CMMI currently addresses three areas of interest:

CMMI was developed by a group of experts from industry, government, and the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at CMU. CMMI models provide guidance for developing or improving processes that meet the business goals of an organization. A CMMI model may also be used as a framework for appraising the process maturity of the organization. By January 2013, the entire CMMI product suite was transferred from the SEI to the CMMI Institute, a newly created organization at Carnegie Mellon.

CMMI originated in software engineering but has been highly generalized over the years to embrace other areas of interest, such as the development of hardware products, the delivery of all kinds of services, and the acquisition of products and services. The word "software" does not appear in definitions of CMMI. This generalization of improvement concepts makes CMMI extremely abstract. It is not as specific to software engineering as its predecessor, the Software CMM (CMM, see below).

CMMI was developed by the CMMi project, which aimed to improve the usability of maturity models by integrating many different models into one framework. The project consisted of members of industry, government and the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI). The main sponsors included the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the National Defense Industrial Association.

CMMI is the successor of the capability maturity model (CMM) or Software CMM. The CMM was developed from 1987 until 1997. In 2002, CMMI Version 1.1 was released, Version 1.2 followed in August 2006, and CMMI Version 1.3 in November 2010. Some of the major changes in CMMI V1.3 are the support of Agile Software Development, improvements to high maturity practices and alignment of the representation (staged and continuous).

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