Extreme Programming from a CMM Perspective

The Software CMM The Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University developed the SW-CMM as a model for building organizational capability, and it has been widely adopted in the software community and beyond. As Table 1 shows, the SW-CMM is a five-level model that describes good engineering and management practices and prescribes improvement priorities for software organizations. Although the SW-CMM is described in a book of nearly 500 pages, the requirements for becoming a Level 5 organization are concisely stated in 52 sentences—the 52 goals of the model’s 18 key process areas (KPAs). The practices, subpractices, and examples that flesh out the model can guide software professionals in making reasonable, informed decisions about a broad range of process implementations. The SW-CMM informative materials focus primarily on large projects and large organizations. With minor tailoring and common sense, however, the model can be applied in radically different environments, ranging from twoto three-person projects in small start-up companies to 500-person projects building hard real-time, life-critical systems.2,3 The SW-CMM’s rating components are intentionally abstract, capturing “universal truths” about high-performance software organizations. As a glance at Table 2 shows, the KPAs are clearly important to all types of software organizations. With the exception of software subcontract management, which applies only to organizations that do subcontracting, the KPAs and their goals can apply to any software organization. Companies that focus on innovation more than operational excellence might downplay the role of consisExtreme Programming from a CMM Perspective