Quality Software, Process, and CMMI

Go to the penultimate website for creating good and useful software through a disciplined process that documents everything (a senior technical writer's idea of heaven), and for how to relaunch software that has failed.

Creating useful software can save a company large amounts of money in reduced production time and significantly reduced errors. 

The Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon teaches the Capability Maturity Model Intebration (CMMItm) to thousands of companies every day which proves that good management, planning, and a continual improvement process lead to changes in key process areas along the software development cycle. Their CMM tools are to the modern software cathedrals what a plumb and level were to medieval cathedrals.

CMMI Overview PowerPointtm Presentation
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/general/general.html
What is CMMI
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/general/general.html
CMMI Performance Results
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmmi/results.html

As to why you might want to use CMMI as your process system to improve your product and profits, the table below, courtesy of the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute CMMI Performance Results website page, is worth a look.

Results (reported as of December 15, 2005)

You can view examples of CMMI performance results by organization or by performance category. The following table contains a summary of the performance results:

Performance Category	Median	Number of Data Points		Low	High
Cost	20%	21		3%	87%
Schedule	37%	19		2%	90%
Productivity	62%	17		9%	255%
Quality	50%	20		7%	132%
Customer Satisfaction	14%	6		-4%	55%
Return on Investment	4.7 : 1	16		2 : 1	27.7 : 1

This table summarizes quantitative information from 25 organizations that have reported results that can be expressed as performance changes over time.