As a CMMI Consultant, during CMMI consulting assignment, you may be asked about the benefits of CMMI related to Improvement in Schedule Targets, Post-Release Defect Density and Cost Savings to the End User. CMMI Consultants may answer this question by taking input from the post below:

CMMI FAQ 0

3rd March, 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 involves The Tufts Health Plan, a health maintenance organization (HMO), was founded in 1979 as a not-for-profit organization. Before starting with SW-CMM and CMMI, it already has a Quality Management Framework covering system development and project delivery life cycle. It started SW-CMM effort in 2001 and it achieved a SW-CMM Maturity Level 3 in Dec, 2004. It also started its journey of CMMI in January 2005. As a result of the CMMI Process Improvement following improvements were observed:

Based on the Metrics Management system established by the organization, Process Performance at Org level was measured using the cumulative results of measurement in projects.

Reduction in defects

Figure: Defects Identified in Testing

Testing conducted by Tufts Health Plan IT are of different types including unit, functional, systems and acceptance testing. As shown above there was an overall reduction in the defects identified on Testing by 44% and in the year 2004-2005 it was reduced by 16%.

Effective Peer Reviews

Figure: Total Issues Found in Peer Reviews

Peer reviews are part of the Quality Assurance activities performed at Tufts Health Plan. There was an increase of 68% in the number of peer reviews during 2004 and 2005. Number of issues found in the reviews increased by 59 percent. All this leads to the fixing of issues before reaching them to the customers.

Change Requests at Tufts Health Plan

Figure: Change Requests at Tufts Health Plan

As shown above, there was a reduction in the number of corrective change requests leading to more productive environment. Apart from this, the proportion of corrective change requests remained relatively low around 23% and there were 15% more total changes between 2004 and 2005.

Reduction in Total Production Issues

Figure: Production Issues at Tufts Health Plan

Product issues, number of issues occurred in the production processing environment, were reduced by 8% over the period 2004-2005 and by approximately by 50% during the year 20002-2005.

If we summaries these improvements, we can say that:

• Reduction in defects found in testing by 16%
• Increase in the number of peer reviews by 68%
• Increase in peer reviews defects by 59%
• Reduction in corrective change requests by 2%
• Reduction in production issues by 8%