Blending Agile Development Methods with CMMI®

by Glen B. Alleman

There are two popular myths living on opposite poles of the software development globe [11]. The first myth, which lives in the high-ceremony world of government contractors and corporate IT outsourcing organizations, holds that agile development processes are the same as "hacking" -- undisciplined, ad hoc, and prone to rapid change by external forces. The other myth, which lives in software firms that practice some variant of an agile development methodology (Extreme Programming [XP], Scrum, etc.), holds that the Software Engineering Institute's (SEI) Capability Maturity Model® Integration (CMMI®) [8] is a dinosaur that will go the way of all dinosaurs. ¹ This camp claims that the CMMI processes do not address the core issue of software -- validating that the customers are getting what they want in the presence of changing requirements.