As a CMMI Consultant, during CMMI consulting assignment, you may be asked about the benefits of CMMI related to Cost of Quality and Cost of Poor Quality, Product Cycle Time Reduction Rate and Post-Release Defect Rate (per KLOC). CMMI Consultants may answer this question by taking input from the post below:

CMMI FAQ 0

2nd January, 2015

A study was conducted by the SEI (now CMMI Institute) on the measurement data collected from 35 large organizations across the world. These organizations having low as well as high maturity apply CMMI Process Improvement practices to their Software Engineering, System Engineering and other Engineering activities.

This study was conducted Motorola GSG Russia Center, after implementing CMMI for one year. During this period process improvement was conducted in line with OID Process Area. Study involves results collected from 30 projects.

Following are some of the improvements:

Cost of Quality and Cost of Poor Quality

Figure: Cost of Quality and Cost of Poor Quality

The Russian center was able to reduce the Cost of Quality, reduce the Product Cycle Time and maintain Compliance with the Six Sigma based quality improvement. Cost of Quality was measured on the basis of effort spent on Verification (Review and Testing), Audit and Problem Prevention. Whereas Cost of Poor Quality was dependent on rework effort. As seen above Cost of Quality was reduced from approximately 50% to around 25% and Cost of Poor Quality remained under 5% throughout the period.

Product Cycle Time Reduction Rate

Figure: Product Cycle Time Reduction Rate

As seen above, the product cycle time was reduced by 40% and most of which got reduced after the CMMI Deployment.

Post-Release Defect Rate (per KLOC)

Figure: Post-Release Defect Rate (per KLOC)

Similarly the post-release defects rate was reduced from 0.05 per KLOC to around 0.02 KLOC and the rate was sustained after CMMI Deployment start.

After the Deployment, the Return On Investment (ROI) was 1.7:1 for the 1^st quarter. Less effort was spent on projects, keeping the quality up. There was overall a reduction in Cost of Quality and Cycle Time based on effort spent. Ratings of Process Practitioners’ Satisfaction surveys conducted by the center were improved from 8.8 to 9.2 out of 10 points.

Source: Performance Results of CMMI®-Based Process Improvement Report.