CMMI with Digité Universal Process Framework

CMMI with Digité Universal Process Framework

Introduction
In today's world, software is becoming a larger part of many products and services. As the
importance of software in systems increases, they are strongly influenced by software
quality and by the processes used to acquire, develop and maintain the software.

Developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), CMMI is a process improvement
model that provides a set of best practices, and a yardstick for appraising current practices
in software operations. CMMI defines five maturity levels to support and guide process
improvement with two alternative approaches staged and continuous.

Staged Representation models provide a proven sequence of improvements,
beginning with basic management practices and progressing through a
predefined and proven path of successive levels, each serving as a foundation for
the next.
Continuous representation designates capability levels for process improvement
within each process area and allows an organization to choose the order of
improvement most relevant to its business needs.

Challenges of CMMI Implementation
Both large and small organizations encounter issues in implementing CMMI in their
environment. While large organizations often have a separate process-engineering group
(SEPG) for defining and deploying processes, small organizations depend on champions
within projects for process adoption. Therefore the pace of implementation is dependent on
the workload and motivation levels of these individual champions.

There is a danger of knowledge not being shared with the rest of the organization and a
potential loss of knowledge when these champions leave the organization. Organization
process improvement depends on continuous monitoring and successive refinement of the
implemented processes.

Ideally a tool that allows companies to model their lifecycle processes, maintain them in a
central repository and provide a framework to standardize, automate, collect and share
metrics will benefit small organizations to adopt CMMI prescribed process improvement
strategies. Also organizations need flexibility in pacing the process improvements, as they
are sensitive to business cycles and employee turnover. Such a tool would have the
following characteristics:

1. Process Templates to implement a standard software process, including pre-defined
generic CMMI templates of different types
2. Defining and tracking metrics for key process areas and key practices
3. Instantiating and executing projects based on template and tailoring guidelines
4. Monitoring project and process performance against organization's goals

© Copyright 2007 All Rights Reserved | Digite Inc. | www.digite.com


Digité Universal Process Framework
Digité Universal Process Framework (UPF)
defines a computational framework for
modeling software development lifecycle
management processes associated with a
wide range of development
methodologies such as RUP, PMBOK, and
Agile, consistent with CMMI
capability/maturity goals of the
organization. Using process templates, an
organization can develop and maintain an
array of process models to support
different project types. Further, these
templates can be instantiated in
accordance with the tailoring guidelines to
provide company wide consistent process
implementation.

The hierarchical constitution of the UPF is
shown in the figure 1. It is based on the
concepts that all methodologies employ a
consistent set of practices that execute
concurrently during the lifecycle of the
project. Project Mgmt, Requirements Mgmt and Configuration Mgmt are typical practices
one would encounter in most software methodologies.

Practices may be hierarchical and contain sub-practices as needed. Each practice
has a set of goals to be fulfilled as we step through each of the lifecycle phases of
the project, and these goals are expressed in a goal matrix.
The practice goals are realized through a set of standard activities that
distinguish the practice.
The activity matrix defines the standard activities for the practice in a given
phase.
The role-activity bindings define roles that may perform a specific activity, as
established by the methodology.
Structured review and approval workflows may be imposed on activities and work
products through appropriate e-form item/workflow templates.
A reasonable degree of flexibility in the process configuration may be achieved
with tailoring guidelines to suit the project and organization context.



CMMI Implementation with UPF
The CMMI templates are modeled as follows:
Maturity Levels and their corresponding KPA's are modeled as a hierarchy of
practices in UPF and utilized as needed in the process template
PLC, SDLC phases and iterations are defined as per standard practices for the
project type (application development, maintenance etc.) and applied to the
template
An Activity Matrix is created, in which standard activities that realize key
practices of the KPA are associated with different lifecycle phases as pertinent
A Goal Matrix is created, associating appropriate numeric goals of the KPA with
the lifecycle phases
Role-Activity bindings ensure that activities are assigned in the project to workers
with ability to perform these activities
Templates of pertinent functions such as Requirements, Test, Defect, Issues,
Risk, DAR, DP and Change Management which are tailored to the process
requirements are attached to the Process Template and are thus inherited by the
adopting projects

The activity matrix of a generic CMMI process template is partially shown in the table 1:

Table 1: Activity matrix of a generic CMMI process template

To further facilitate the adoption of CMMI, Digité is in the process of developing a knowledge
base of SDLC processes based on CMMI guidelines for both staged and continuous
representation. These templates can be further customized by addition or deletion of KPA's,
iterations, key practices, roles and item/workflow templates, prior to deployment. Once the
template is instantiated for a project, the UPF creates a project workspace that employs
terminology, menu functions and user experience consistent with the CMMI model and
guides the project manager through the tailoring process.

After tailoring is completed, detailed project plan can be created using project scheduling
tools such as Microsoft Project® and imported into the system for execution and
monitoring. In addition, during the execution of the project, UPF allows further modifications
to the project based on tailoring guidelines. For example, one may add additional phase or
iteration to the project to support Agile methodologies, or one may add new work-packets
to support additional work orders and track their related effort and cost separately.



By providing an integrated platform that supports all
aspects of CMMI related project execution activities,
such as, requirement management, time sheet,
issue/defect management, Digité Enterprise is able to
automate the collection of relevant KPA’s and their
analysis. This significantly reduces the burden of
complying with CMMI. Examples of measures
collected include: Schedule, effort, and resource
variations based on deliverables or project phases,
test coverage and effectiveness, defect density, and
compliance to various goals and service level
agreements. Further, it also allows comparison of
current project against historical data from similar
projects.

Case Study
Aztec Software and Technology Services Ltd., (www.aztecsoft.com) is implementing process
automation using Digité Enterprise to facilitate its CMMI initiatives at its offshore
development center in India. Aztec's specialty is in software product development services
that accelerate the creation of software products, reduces time to market and help make
schedules predictable in order to better manage resources, predict costs, and reduce market
and technology risks.

Founded in 1995, Aztec has serviced more than 100 customers worldwide. Aztec Software
has executed projects with many of the largest global software companies. Project team
sizes vary from 5 to over 300. Since deployment in late 2004, over 10 projects are already
using Digité Enterprise and the rest are adopting it progressively.

Raghavan M, Head-Quality at Aztec Software and Technology Services Limited, who is
leading the implementation of Digité Enterprise says: “In our CMMI journey we have two
areas where we could do with automation. First, compliance and maintaining audit
trails/documentary evidences for the different project activities. Without a tool like Digité
Enterprise, these activities will involve significantly more effort on the part of the Project
Leaders. With Digité Enterprise, we are in the process of automating activities such as
Project Initiation, Project Planning, obtaining commitments from the various support groups
as well tracking of action items/issues with the different support groups involved. The tool
provides a flexible framework that would help us in obtaining stakeholders' commitment and
maintaining activity trails (traceability). Also, the process of Audits could be automated to a
large extent; all documentary evidences are available online thus reducing the effort
involved in these activities by which we can focus our efforts more on Process Improvement
Activities rather than merely ensuring process compliance.

The second area is Data Collection and Metrics. Earlier, the organization had disparate tools
for capturing raw data such as Timesheets, Defects and Issues etc. These were tedious
manual efforts involving collating data from these systems, manipulating them and
computing relevant metrics. Visibility into resource utilization and project health was also
quite cumbersome. By using a process automation tool such as Digité Enterprise all the
metrics are collected centrally as a by-product of automation, and available on-demand. To
make CMMI effective, metrics should be automatically collected and instantly visible at any



point in time from anywhere. A traffic signal like project health indicator is essential for
management review when managing multiple projects concurrently. Digité Enterprise's
metrics collection framework is helping in tracking the defects, efforts and schedule
variances, and delivers value to our customers.

Based on the initial success, Aztec plans to move all our future projects to Digité Enterprise.
We are also looking forward to develop a richer knowledge base so that the tool can provide
contextual help on the best practices.”

Summary
For organizations embarking on process improvements based on the CMMI model, tool such
as Digité will help them quickly deploy processes and achieve level of execution consistent
with CMMI goals. Using process compliance metrics, organizations can assess their current
readiness for certification and discover areas of improvement. For CMMI-certified
companies, Digité provides flexibility through the UPF to convert their organizational
processes into Digité templates and manage them over time.

About Digité Enterprise Solution

Digité Enterprise, which is a leading-edge software application for managing
enterprise business processes and project portfolios, is designed for the emerging
realities of a connected world. A world in which information flows immediately to
where it’s needed, teams are based on skills and economics rather than location
and company boundaries, and business processes are constantly honed for
competitive advantage. Digité Enterprise provides a highly customizable and
comprehensive software framework that forms the central hub of a business or IT
initiative, providing stakeholders with their own role based portal view. In short, Digité
Enterprise is designed to enable the way people work in today's world.

Contact
Learn more about the enterprise-solutions by visiting www.digite.com or contacting
one of our sales representatives in your area.

Head Office Development Centre Development Centre
Digité Inc. Digité Infotech Pvt. Ltd Digité Infotech Pvt. Ltd
82 Pioneer Way, Suite # 102 Samruddhi Venture Park No.822, 8th Block,
Mountain View 4th floor, Central MIDC Road Koramangala,
CA94041 Andheri (E), Mumbai 93 Bangalore-44
USA India India

Phone: 650-210-3900 Phone: +91-22-28316033-35 Phone: +91-80-32917988-91
Fax: +91-22-28382645

Copyright © 2007 Digité Inc. All rights reserved. Digité. All other product or company names are used
for identification purposes only, and may be trademarks of their respective owners. * CMMI® is
registered trademark of Carnegie Mellon University - Software Engineering Institute (SEI-CMU).


CMMI with Digité Universal Process Framework

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