Capability Maturity Model Integration - Overview

Overview

CMMI currently addresses three areas of interest:

1. Product and service development — CMMI for Development (CMMI-DEV),
2. Service establishment, management, — CMMI for Services (CMMI-SVC), and
3. Product and service acquisition — CMMI for Acquisition (CMMI-ACQ).

CMMI was developed by a group of experts from industry, government, and the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University. CMMI models provide guidance for developing or improving processes that meet the business goals of an organization. A CMMI model may also be used as a framework for appraising the process maturity of the organization.

CMMI originated in software engineering but has been highly generalised over the years to embrace other areas of interest, such as the development of hardware products, the delivery of all kinds of services, and the acquisition of products and services. The word "software" does not appear in definitions of CMMI. This generalization of improvement concepts makes CMMI extremely abstract. It is not as specific to software engineering as its predecessor, the Software CMM (CMM, see below).