Applying the CMM to E-Projects

by Donna L. Johnson

Let's go back in time to the mid-1980s when the US Department of Defense (DoD) was faced with huge cost and schedule overruns on its large, software-intensive programs. The Internet had not yet materialized, and the software industry was beset with a steady stream of "silver bullets" (e.g., structured programming, reuse, rapid prototyping, total quality management, reengineering) designed to solve the industry's increasing problems with software development (missed schedules, cost overruns, poor quality). The Software Engineering Institute's (SEI) Capability Maturity Model for Software (SW-CMM, or CMM) was born in this era when the DoD tasked the SEI to develop a means to measure the maturity of an organization's software development process (see sidebar, "Overview of the Capability Maturity Model"). The DoD hoped the SEI's solution would be its "silver bullet" for controlling program overruns: it would provide a yardstick against which to evaluate the software development capability of potential contractors bidding on DoD software procurements.