Page 203 - SOFTWARE TESTING & QUALITY ASSURANCE

Software Testing and Quality Assurance

Let us now discuss in brief the main components of CMM.
1. Maturity Levels: The maturity levels represent the level of process capability an organization
possesses. CMM has five levels of maturity. Here, the top level is an ideal state where processes
are systematically managed through process optimization and continuous process improvement,
while the initial level is characterized by ad-hoc processes.

2. Process Capability: This indicates if the current state of processes will help the organization in
meeting its quality expectations. This capability helps in predicting the results for an upcoming
software project that the organization takes up.
3. Key Process Areas (KPA): It is a group of associated activities that strives to attain a set of goals
when performed together. It also sets up a process capability at the maturity level. For example,
Software project delivery planning.
4. Goals: It reviews the essential practices of a process area and tells whether a project or an
organization has been successful in implementing the process area. The goal also points to the
importance and the purpose of each process area.
5. Common Features: Common features are the characteristics that tell whether the implementation
of a key process area is successful and permanent.
6. Key Practices: Each process region is defined in terms of key practices that assist to help the key
process area. The key practices describe the infrastructure and performances that matter most to
the application of a process. For example, the project's software delivery schedule plan is
designed according to a documented procedure.
Reading further will help us to understand the five maturity levels of CMM.
14.1.1 Five Levels of CMM

CMM for software has an extensively accepted set of strategies for developing high performance
software companies. Improvised set of software development methods cannot sustain unless
Application Development (AD) company behavior changes to help them. Humphrey planned the
process maturity framework to assist AD companies and to increase the quality of their AD methods in
five levels.
Basically made up of five levels of development, CMM is an exclusive model which depicts an
organization’s growth and change. The five level development methods are changed from a disordered
state to an ordered state, which is capable of producing good results.
As an AD organization advances from one level to another, its depiction changes, and it undergoes
improvisation of development processes. This has been illustrated in figure 14.2.

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