As a CMMI Consultant, during CMMI consulting assignment, you may be asked about the benefits of CMMI related to Cost of Quality, Estimation Accuracy, and Product Quality. CMMI Consultants may answer this question by taking input from the post below

CMMI FAQ 0

29th November, 2014

A study was conducted by the SEI (now CMMI Institute) on the metrics 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.

In this study Global Software Group (GSG) of Motorola Systems observed the effect of the CMMI Process Improvement initiative started by the organization. Customer’s satisfaction ratings during this period and afterward continued to be exceeded.

The quantitative data for improvement was collected from 170 projects from 2000 to 2005 and was maintained in a Motorola GSG central data warehouse.

Cost of poor quality

Figure – Cost of Quality

Due to improvement in verification process, cost of quality improved over a 36.5 percent from the pre-CMMI period and cost of poor quality remained under control and less than 5 percent through this period.

Faults per thousand lines of code

Figure – In Process Faults per Thousand Lines of Code

Due to improvement verification process, as seen cost of quality was reduced and as a result the product quality was improved. Verification process was enhanced with Causal Analysis and Resolution Process Area. All this lead to fewer defects injection and decrease in software faults per KLOC (Kilo Lines of Code) by 40.2 percent than pre-CMMI period.

Estimation Accuracy

Figure – Estimation Accuracy

During the process improvement activities like project planning, estimation and project monitoring were improved and that leads to the an improvement in effort estimation accuracy by 31.4 percent moving from SW-CMM Maturity Level 5 to CMMI Maturity Level 5. It was also observed that estimation accuracy for schedule was improved by 84.2%.

Overall Customer Satisfaction

Figure – Overall Customer Satisfaction

A delivery rate of 100% was maintained leading to high customer satisfaction ratings on project closure. On an average a score of over 9 (“excellent”) was maintained, which was less than 9 prior to the CMMI initiative. High customer satisfaction rating was a result of delivering cost effective, high quality products on time.

As a result of CMMI Implementation, Motorola GSG China was able to double the staff and was able to increase commercial business volumes by 55%.

This shows that CMMI Process Implementation can lead to reduced cost of quality, improvement in estimation accuracy, customer satisfaction and product quality.

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