Applying continuous CMMI on small and medium sized companies with Agile practices

Abstract

The Software industry is one of the fastest growing branches of economy in the EU because of the highly educated workforce. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) represent 99% of all businesses in the EU, including the software industry. Most young software development SMEs start their development without a welldefined development approach. As the SMEs mature their need for a well-structured development approach. The implementation of methodologies to structure and control the development activities in start-ups and SMEs is a major challenge for engineers. In general, the management of software development is achieved through the introduction of software processes. In the SME context, software engineering faces complex and multifaceted obstacles in understanding how to manage development processes. SMEs usually have limited resources and typically wish to use them to support product development instead of establishing processes. This means that they turn to Agile methodology for a product and customer-oriented approach. Many new SMEs focus on team productivity, asserting more control to the employees instead of providing them with rigid guidelines. But that flexibility and freedom can negatively influence the quality of the product or on the vision and future direction of development. Compared to the Agile methodology, there other approaches for software development with more structure. CMMI-DEV is used in this thesis. Agile and CMMI-DEV practices are often considered as opposites in the software development methodologies spectrum. Agile is seen as fluid and adaptable but lacking solid management and improvement strategies while CMMI is seen as rigid, costly to implement and maintain but with clearly defined goals and methods to reach them. In this thesis an attempt is made, to create a process improvement approach for Agile environments based on the CMMI-DEV model. To that end a Systematic Literature Review(SLR) was conducted to determine the state of the art in relation with the possible cooperation of CMMI-DEV and Agile. During the SLR, it was decided that the direct combination of CMMI-DEV and Agile is too vague and hard to practically implement, so SCRUM was chosen as a representing Agile practice. Using SCRUM as the new focus of the CMMI-DEV – Agile combination, a mapping was made, based on the SLR, between process areas of CMMI-DEV for Maturity Level 2 and SCRUM practices. Not all process areas could be covered and for some process areas additional actions had to be defined. With the mapping of CMMI-DEV process areas to SCRUM defined the next step was creating a way to determine the current process area coverage in the SCRUM environment. This was done by tailoring the Standard CMMI Appraisal Method for Process Improvement (SCAMPI) to the needs of an SME using SCRUM. The tailoring produced questionnaires, based on the previously defined mapping, and was created with having the limited resources available for process improvement in SMEs in mind. The tailored SCAMPI covered the first two phases of the new process improvement approach. The two remaining phases of the improvement approach were defined by (Initiating, Diagnosing, Establishing, Acting, Leveraging) improvement lifecycle models and tailoring the combination to a SME environment. After the new improvement approach was defined a case study was conducted in a Madrid based SME. All the problems that were encountered as well as the results of the case study can be seen in the case study chapter. The main conclusion of the case study is that the improvement approach was a good start, but it requires further refinement in order to reach its peak performance. At the end of the thesis in the conclusion chapter an overview of the work done is given, with a focus on the contributions made by the thesis. In the end the positive and the negative sides of the new approach are highlighted and suggestions for future research are given.