Some suggestions to carry out CMM assessment in China, Zhou Bosheng (this article reprinted from Software Engineering Expert Network www.21cmm.com)
From the US software industry development, it can be seen that the software industry has structured production methods (1975-1995), with process-centric production methods (1985-2005) and industrial production methods (1995- Today) A development phase. my country's software organizations can summarize the following three aspects: First, my country is moving into process-centric production methods and industrial production methods by structural production methods. There have been many companies (regardless of national or private companies) to recognize the management of software, implementation of scientific, systematic management, to improve their skills of software capabilities, indicating that there is a powerful power of improving self. Second, there is still some difficulties in the road to advance, such as some organizations to improve the ability to maturity through ISO9000 and CMM, but they are not familiar with the concept of cmm, and do not know what difference between CMM and ISO9000. Most software organizations are weak in software engineering theory and practices, although the software process is established, but the process phase is not obvious, software production is disorderly, the progress, budget, quality prediction and control are not encountered. The problem will give up the original plan, pay attention to programming and testing, ignore demand analysis and architecture design. High-level management has not attracted sufficient attention to software management, and there is no adequate resource or qualified personnel to improach work. Third, lack of documentation process description, especially lack of work documents (such as changes in the process), workload statistics (such as time and workload statistics table, weekly status report), and risk management documents (such as risk estimation) Report, risk assessment report). Lack of measurements for process and products, there are few historical data in the software process, so it is difficult to reasonably based on historical data on workload and progress. Each software organization should find out the existence gap in accordance with the CMM standard based on the current state of understanding. The gap is not mature enough, but it is also a place to improve software process management. Software Process Improvement is a working technology containing a large number of management components, which mainly includes the following three key steps: compare the current state and expectation to find the existence gap; determine which gap should be changed, what to change? Experience; formulate the corresponding specific implementation plan, "specific" means: there must be clear, can be tested; to set the standard of success or not; there must be specific implementation methods; And clear specific responsibilities and tasks; to clearly implement the main leadership or coordinators of the plan to resolve problems in planning implementation; to list the new technologies and new tools applied by the Implementation Program and how to get these New technology and new tools. my country's software industry is in the ascendant, implementing CMM, can change my country's software engineering culture, improve software personnel, not only is of great significance to my country's economy, but also to improve software enterprise quality, enhance software enterprises. International competitiveness, And it also creates conditions for the export of software. CMM is a better software improvement framework, but CMM only gives something, and does not give it. Therefore, we must carefully study how to follow the CMM model for specific operations. In order to better understand CMM, improve the process management capabilities of software organizations, smooth through the CMM assessment, based on our research and evaluation practice of CMM, the following recommendations are given: high-level management should put more attention in process improvement, Establish a full-time team of process improvement.
This aspect is because the process improvement is the change of ideological concepts and working methods. It is the transformation of corporate culture, which involves most of the staff in the enterprise. On the other hand, it is because the process is one of the three pillars of software industrial production, only high emphasis, strengthening research, learning and practice, can truly make software production toward industrialization. In the software process improvement, the necessary resources should be equipped, to establish a considerable improving team, should reach sufficient efforts in investment. In the organization, first, the software engineering process group (called Sepg) is to be established, and the software process is responsible for improving the task, and the qualified personnel are selected as a full-time SEPG team leader. According to foreign experience, it is generally required to account for 5% to 10% of the development of resources in this software organization. According to the assessment of nearly 1800 organizations in the world, the efficiency of CMM evaluation is 4 times to 8 times the input. Establish a suitable organizational structure, research software engineering theory and software process improvement methods, responsible for formulating and implementing process improvement plans, and they are specific organizers that realize corporate assessment activities. During the execution plan, pay attention to check its compliance, if you are deviation, you should study the reasons, and take the corresponding corrective action, they are the internal assessor and corporate process improvement activities of the company. Monitor. To strengthen training, carry out the ability to evaluate the ability to evaluate the high-quality director, but also have a considerable process assessment team, but also have a huge process to improve the team. It is necessary to realize that only high-quality personnel, perform a mature good process, in order to produce good products, and generally carry out training for CMM and software engineering, so that everyone's personnel have a process improvement, and master the necessary The process improves knowledge and skills. Measurement data is the basis for process improvement, and pay attention to the process of measurement of the process and product. During the entire development process of the project, especially in the milestone, to collect the execution data of the process, the active status is recorded, and the data is used to provide data for the current project, and can be used as a historical data to reserve a reference for future projects. These data mainly include: software scale, workload, cost, and progress estimation data and actual data, product quality measurement data, demand changes, and risk analysis data. We should pay attention to the development of software configuration management and configuration management tools. The main purpose of configuration management is to establish and maintain the integrity of software project products in the entire software life cycle of the project, systematically control the change of configuration items, and manage organization's software engineering assets. Configuration management has a wide range of content, permission management complex, develop or purchase appropriate configuration management tools is necessary. In my country, China has developed CMM assessment, but also pays attention to intellectual introduction, and hiring foreign trade assessors to conduct process assessments for my country, and strive to cultivate our own competent director assessment. This is not only because China is a potential IT big country, but also because CMM implementation is closely related to the culture of a country. In addition, the improvement of the software process itself is also a process, requiring a long-term acquisition of the assistance of the eligible director evaluator. The competent authorities of all walks of life must support and support our own director evaluator, and regard the training of the Director's evaluation as a new product of the transformation and innovation. It is necessary to fully recognize the long-term and arduousness of the process improvement. Process maturity upgrade itself is a process, and there is a life cycle. Therefore, the process improvement will inevitably have inherent features of all processes, and they cannot be very eager. In CMM evaluation, we must promote the combination of the ability maturity model CMM with the individual software process PSP and the group software process ISP, and pay close attention to the new trend of process improvement. All places should be in the support and coordination of the software industry authorities, the strength of all sectors, increase the research, assessment and implementation of software process improvement, and push my country's software industry to advance.
