Guest Editor's Introduction: The Global Pursuit of Process Maturity

In This Issue This focus section offers reports from Asia and North America on corporate-wide implementations of software process improvement programs guided by process standards such as ISO 9000-3 and the Capability Maturity Model. 4–6 Unfortunately , a paper describing a successful corporate wide program in a European company was withdrawn just as this issue was being sent to the printer. The section begins with Gargi Keeni's " Evolution of Quality Processes at Tata Consulting Services. " Keeni describes the decade-long effort to achieve high maturity at TCS in India. The article describes how Tata took a centralized approach to complying with ISO 9000-3, but a phased approach in deploying the CMM. She discusses some of the challenges and methods used in deploying practices at higher CMM levels. She also presents focus D uring the first half of the 1990s, IEEE Software reported the benefits of successful process improvement programs from single sites or divisions in companies such as Hughes, 1 Raytheon, 2 and Mo-torola. 3 During the latter half of the 1990s, many organizations have learned how to implement improvement programs across multiple sites and to spread best practices and lessons learned.