Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model is a framework that defines the key elements of an effective software process. It describes an evolutionary improvement path from an ad hoc, immature process to a mature, disciplined process.
A model developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) of Carnegie Mellon University that describes how organizations develop software. The model identifies five levels or steps organizations go through as they become more sophisticated in their use of process.. Level 1 organizations aren't effective in using processes. Level 5 organizations are mature in their use of process and routinely manage and improve processes. Most organizations fall between Level 2 and 3. We argue that the same general concepts that apply to software organizations apply to any organization that attempts to organize around business processes. ( www.sei.cmu.edu/cmm)
A process with five well-defined levels of sequential development: Initial, Repeatable, Defined, Managed and Optimizing developed by the software Engineering Institute in 1986 to help improve the application of an organization's supporting software technologies. These five maturity levels provide an ordinal scale for measuring the maturity, and therefore the capacity of, an organization's use of its software technologies. The levels also help prioritize an organization's software improvement efforts.
A formal archetype of the evolutionary stages that lead toward a desired level of competency in a particular area of operation, such as software engineering.
A process improvement method that was developed by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. It provides a set of best practices meant to address important aspects of software development: productivity, performance, costs, predictability, and stakeholder satisfaction. The purpose of the CMM is to define the characteristics of a mature, capable process in a way that can be measured and compared to processes at other organizations.
("CMM") A description of the stage s through which organization s evolve as they define, implement, measure, control, and improve their process es. The model provides a guide for selecting process improvement strategies by facilitating the determination of current process capabilities and the identification of the issue s most critical to quality and process improvement. [D05166] SA-CMM
This is a family of process frameworks, one of which (SW-CMM) is tailored explicitly to software development. The model defines five level of maturity and specifies what processes that must by in place to achieve those levels. However, it does not define the processes themselves; they need to be implemented by the local organization.
A scale for assessing the degree of built-in documentation and discipline in a process, in which the scale is: Level 1 - Initial - with no formal process Level 2 - Managed - processes are planned and controlled Level 3 - Defined - processes described in standards, tools, and methods Level 4 - Quantitatively Managed - subprocesses are controlled using data analysis Level 5 - Optimizing - data are used to continuously improve processes. CMM was developed by the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, and now being extended to a broader range of applications in management.
Capability Maturity Model (CMM) broadly refers to a process improvement approach that is based on a process model. CMM also refers specifically to the first such model, developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in the mid-1980s, as well as the family of process models that followed. A process model is a structured collection of practices that describe the characteristics of effective processes; the practices included are those proven by experience to be effective.