Background In the past decades, maturity models have become important tools to visualize progress in adopting processes and standards and to benchmark companies in their industry (Becker et al. 2009). Two of the best known and oldest maturity frameworks are the Capability Maturity Model (CMM; Paulk et al. 1993; Watts 1987) and its follow-up, Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMi; CMMI Pro...

Software process improvement can follow a capability maturity model such as SPICE or CMMi. Or it can focus on improving selected software processes in detail. The latter can either be a stand-alone improvement activity, or it can tune processes that were established or modified due to a large-scale assessment. Some software processes need to be adjusted qualitatively: process steps or deliverab...

Any public administration that produces translation data can be a provider of useful reusable data to meet its own translation needs and the ones of other public organizations and private companies that work with texts of the same domain. These data can also be crucial to produce domain-tuned Machine Translation systems. The organization's management of the translation process, the characterist...

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The recent release of CMMI V1.3 incorporates a number of changes to the model and framework; one of the more interesting is the decision to do away with Capability Levels 4 and 5 in the Continuous Representation, while retaining the high levels of Organizational Maturity. This paper examines some of the issues that may have driven this decision, and explores the opportunity provided for greater...

This paper is based on the application of the People Capability Maturity Model (CMM) to the Foundation Bruno Kessler (FBK), a research centre located in Trento (Italy). People CMM is a framework to study the level of maturity of an organization in order to improve workforce's development and to help management to define people's capabilities in the organization. The project is an ongoing projec...

Maturity models are widely used in process improvement. The users of a maturity model should be confident that the weak points of the assessed processes can be found and that the most valuable changes are introduced. Therefore, the evaluation of maturity models is an important activity. In this paper, a mapping study of the literature on the evaluation of maturity models is presented. Two datab...

The Capability Maturity Model and SPICE approach to software process improvement has resulted in a robust system for improving development process capability in the field of software engineering. We apply these same ideas in the area of e-learning in order to explore whether similar insights could be generated for institutions engaged in online delivery of teaching. In order to test this idea, ...

Software testing is an important tool for ensuring that software products produced and launched on the market reach the appropriate quality standards. Testing maturity models such as MPT.BR or TMMI, appear in the software scenario as a way to support introducing elements that are essential for developing the discipline of software testing within organizations. Together with this reality, it is ...

Leading market analysts such as Gartner, Forrester Research and IDC expect again for 2012 an increase of global information technology (IT) spending between 3.7% and 6.9% compared to 2011. This trend emphasises the fact that ensuring the effectiveness and efficiency of IT or IT evaluation is a substantial task of strategic IT management. Weighing costs and benefits is already a real challenge f...