The role of maturity driven software process improvement in an industry

Abstract

In the current industrial environment, big organizations have adopted maturity driven process improvement efforts. Most of these efforts have been inspired of maturity models like the CMM (Capability Maturity Model) and been guided by the area of Software Process Improvement (SPI). The maturity of an organization’s processes is measured through its maturity level. An organization at high maturity level, means, that it possesses mature processes and it is more trust worthy. In this perspective for an ad hoc organization with no experiences of doing SPI and CMM the efforts have mostly been prolonged, expensive, and not often delivered the effects back to the organizations in the same dimension as investigations. In this paper, we investigate the role of maturity driven process improvement in an industry. In order to achieve this goal, literature study was used to learn from the experiences of companies those have experienced maturity based process improvement. Maturity driven process improvement is suitable for big organizations those can afford consultancy costs and have enough resources to devote for software process improvement team. It seems difficult for smaller companies; one possible reason for many companies to give up software process improvement is that they set their goal to reach a particular certification level or merely achieving a maturity level.The main focus should be on achieving the process improvement instead of achieving a label of specific maturity level.