CMMI uses levels to describe an evolutionary path for organizations to improve their processes for developing and maintaining products and services. There are two improvement paths - focusing on individual process areas or related sets of process areas. Levels characterize the improvement from an ill-defined state to using quantitative data to determine needed improvements. Reaching a level requires satisfying all goals of targeted process areas regardless of using the continuous or staged representation.

1. Tying It All Together

7. Structures of the Continuous and Staged Representations