Characterizing the Software Process: A Maturity Framework

Improvement in the performance of software development organizations is an essential national need. The improvement process has five basic elements 1 - an understanding of the current status of the development process, 2 - a vision of the desired process, 3 - a prioritized list of required improvements actions, 4 - a plan to accomplish these actions and 5 - the resources and commitment toexecute the plan. This paper addresses the first three of these elements, by providing a model for software organizational improvement. The structure of this model provides five maturity levels, identifies the key improvements required at each level, and establishes a priority order for implementation. This model has been tested with a number of organizations and found a reasonably represent the status and needs of actual software development groups.