As a CMMI Consultant, during CMMI consulting assignment, you may be asked about the benefits of CMMI related to Phase Containment Effectiveness, In-Process Faults and Cost of Quality. CMMI Consultants may answer this question by taking input from the post below:

CMMI FAQ 0

23rd December, 2014

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 particular study involves Motorola India Electronics Ltd (MIEL) that was founded in 1991 and had 60 employees in the first year. MIEL had grown to 800 employees before initiating the CMMI Process Improvement in March, 2013. As a result of benefits from CMMI process improvement, in the Feb, 2006 MSIL had grown to the strength of 2400 employees.

Performance Results

This study is based on the 40 projects each year. Assessment for CMMI Maturity level 5 was done for in 2003. In year 2004, as part of the implementation different tools (like inspection process, EPMS, and Teamplay [Primavera 06b]) were mapped to the Process Areas like Project Planning, Project Monitoring and Control, Verification, and Validation. Audit Process was also improved in year 2005.

Following are some of the improvements:

Phase Containment Effectiveness

Figure: Phase Containment Effectiveness

Due to improved and automated Audit Process MIEL was able to conduct rigorous audits and was able to detect non-compliances (NCs) in audits. In year 2005, MEIL detected 412 NCs in 50 audits compared to 109 NCs in 82 audits conducted earlier over a period of three month.

Despite enormous growth in employee strengths and number of projects, Phase Containment Effectiveness (PCE) for Requirements, Design and Coding was sustained at 90%, 8% and 12% respectively against 100 percent of total phase containment effectiveness. As a result of this more defects were contained in development phases. This leads to less rework as well as the low number of defects.

In-Process Faults

Figure: In-Process Faults

As shown in the above figure, as a result of institutionalization of CMMI Process Areas like Causal Analysis and Resolution (CAR), Organizational Innovation and Deployment (OID), Technical Solution (TS), and Decision Analysis and Resolution (DAR) there was a reduction the major in-process faults (IPF) from 5.21 to 3.22 faults per KLOC from year 2003 to 2005.

Cost of Quality

Figure: Cost of Quality

As shown in the above figure, Cost of quality (COQ) was reduced from 50% to 35% since 2003 to 2005. It shall be noted here that percentage of the COQ increased due to implementation of automated tools. It was an impact of the institutionalization of Verification (VER), Validation (VAL), and Organizational Innovation and Deployment (OID) process areas.

As a result of improvement in quality and innovation, Customer feedback ratings also increased from an average of 8 to 9.

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