As a CMMI Consultant, during CMMI consulting assignment, you may be asked about the benefits of CMMI related to Cost Performance Indices, Schedule Performance Indices, Defect Density and Defect Containment. CMMI Consultants may answer this question by taking input from the post below:

CMMI FAQ 0

20th January, 2015

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.

This study was conducted at Raytheon Network Centric Systems (NCS), headquartered in McKinney, Texas. Raytheon NCS is involved with the development and production of mission solutions for networking and command and control. Process Improvement activities at Raytheon NCS started in 1989. Between 1989 and 2001, Raytheon NCS was involved with development, deployment and improvement of processes. It achieved SW-CMM Maturity Level 2 in year 1992, SW-CMM Maturity Level 3 in year 1994, and applied Six Sigma practices to the adoption of SW-CMM and achieved maturity level 4 in June 2001. During the journey of process improvement, it observed following improvements:

Cost and Schedule Performance Indices (CPI and SPI)

Figure: Cost Performance Indices (CPI)

As per the study conducted, between SW-CMM Maturity Level 4 in 2001 and CMMI Maturity Level 5 in 2003, Raytheon NCS was able to improve CPI by 5 percent and was able to reduce variation by 34%.

Schedule Performance Index was improved by the 8% and there was a reduction in variation of 50% between the same period.

Defect Density and Defect Containment

Figure: Defect Density and Defect Containment

Between SW-CMM Maturity Level 4 in 2001 and CMMI Maturity Level 5 in 2003, Raytheon NCS observed an improvement of 44% in the Defect Density. There was a reduction of 31% in the variation of Defect Density. Organization used the Lines of Code for measuring the Defects Density and used the Statistical Process Control to measure time spent on Peer Reviews.

Overall a ROI of 3:1 was observed by the organization. Overall quality program and its improvements in business performance were the major strengths identified in the CMMI maturity level 5 appraisal.

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