A Technical History of the SEI

The SEI developed a more explicit model with practices focused on establishing a richer set of
constructs in which to place and organize the practices within each maturity level. One such construct
was the “key process area” with its goals and key
practices (another was the “common features”). The key
process areas were identified through three sources: (1)
problem areas and practices associated with each maturity
level [Humphrey 1989], (2) multiple practitioner
community reviews and workshops, and (3) statistical
analyses of both assessment and questionnaire data (e.g.,
could the results of the latter predict the former?). Key
process areas also became a mechanism for reporting
and rating the results of an assessment and setting targets
for process improvement and would serve as a basis
for developing and updating the questionnaire, which
would now serve more of a diagnostic purpose.
As a result of these activities, the SEI published the
Software Capability Maturity Model [Paulk 1993] and
updated the software process assessment and software
capability evaluation methods to make use of the explicit
model.
The Consequence: A Revolutionary
International Movement
With the publication of a practitioner community-vetted
explicit model of software development practice, worldwide
adoption grew each year for many years. The SEI
created user group meetings, later called Software Engineering
Process Group (SEPG) conferences, as a means
of interacting with the practitioner community and
broadly sharing lessons learned. Software Process Improvement
Networks (SPINs), organizations or individuals
regularly hosting meetings for co-located software
process improvement champions and the curious, grew
in number from two in 1992 to about fifty by 1998. The
number of formal assessments also grew dramatically.
The Software CMM thus launched the process improvement
movement, and other CMMs emerged [Bate 1994,
Konrad 1996] as other communities recognized their
value [Davenport 2005].
The View from Others
The model, created in 1987, has
become a worldwide standard for
software development processes
and is now embedded within many
government and industry organizations.
It has provided an objective
basis for measuring progress
in software engineering and for
comparing one software provider’s
processes to another’s.
This in turn has facilitated the
growth of offshore providers in India
and China by commoditizing
software development processes
and making them more transparent
to buyers.
– Thomas Davenport,
currently President’s
Distinguished Professor in
Management and
Information Technology at
Babson College [Davenport
2005]
The CMM is not a panacea and it
does not solve all problems. In
fact, a case could be made that the
CMM creates a few problems of its
own. In general, however, the superimposition
of the CMM structure
on a good sized organization
has benefited it wherever that has
occurred.
– Capers Jones, Chief
Scientist Emeritus, Software
Productivity Research [CAI
2005]
CMU/SEI-2016-SR-027 | SOFTWARE ENGINEERING INSTITUTE | CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY 111
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