Achieving a CMMI ROI through Integrated Lifecycle Solutions

Transcription

1 Achieving a CMMI ROI through Integrated Lifecycle Solutions Dominic Tavassoli This document contains proprietary information that belongs to Telelogic AB. Using any of the information contained herein or copying or imaging all or part of this document by any means is strictly forbidden without express written consent of Telelogic AB. Telelogic, Telelogic Tau, Telelogic DOORS, Rhapsody, Statemate and System Architect are registered trademarks, Telelogic Synergy and Telelogic Change are trademarks of Telelogic AB CMM and Capability Maturity Model are registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. CMM Integration, CMMI, SCAMPI, and IDEAL are service marks of Carnegie Mellon University.

2 Table of Contents Overview... 4 Introduction... 5 Process improvement and the CMMI... 6 The Capability Maturity Model... 6 Demonstrated success... 6 The CMMI and its different representations... 8 The continuous model... 8 The staged model Key Process Areas Engineering Support Project management Process management Implementing the CMMI process areas Engineering Requirements management Requirements development End to end traceability Developing customer requirements Visual requirements modeling Managing requirements change Technical solution One common language: UML/SysML Requirements Driven Development Verification and validation Aligning requirements and tests Additional engineering process areas Support process areas Configuration management Going beyond basic CM Round-trip traceability Process and product quality assurance Causal analysis and resolution Enterprise Change Management Integrated defect management Requirements change control of 35

3 Measurement and analysis Additional support process areas Project Management Project monitoring and control...27 Management by exception Monitoring project progress vs. the plan Additional project management process areas Process Management Organizational process focus, definition, performance, innovation and deployment Actionable Architecture...30 Organizational training Best practices for process improvement Telelogic Lifecycle Solutions for the CMMI Conclusion About Telelogic of 35

4 Overview In this Technical White Paper, we ll be taking a look at the history and the structure of the CMMI, as well as the benefits and ROI that organizations have achieved after implementation. The paper also outlines recommendations and best practices to facilitate adoption. Finally, it introduces how Telelogic Lifecycle Solutions can help implement CMMI key processes in a consistent, integrated fashion. 4 of 35

5 Introduction Development teams face ever-increasing challenges. Organizations must manage variants to address different needs and platforms; products have to be delivered as soon as possible; and resources are tightly controlled. "Do more with less" is no longer an option, but the golden rule. Software is a key ingredient of arguably every critical system or product today, as cars, telephones, music players, cameras, and washing machines all become more "intelligent." Web sites have become the main company showroom and customer interface, with millions of users checking their bank accounts, buying books, booking plane flights, and even playing poker. The ubiquity and omnipresence of systems and software, as well as the rapid diffusion of information, increases the need for reliability and high performance. Any minor glitch can spiral into a global issue, forcing enterprises to react, or better still, spend upfront to mitigate risk and increase reliability. Likewise, the required performance for your system that s due out in 6 months might simply be defined as "better than what the competition will have in 6 months." Team structures are equally complex. Mergers, acquisitions, and joint-ventures have spread most organizations over multiple locations, time zones, languages, and cultures. Studies show that just being in separate buildings on the same site reduces face-to-face conversation to nearly zero. Add offshore development, with its own challenges, and it s easy to see why a foolproof communication and collaboration process is critical. To address these challenges, organizations are implementing process improvement initiatives to increase their competitive edge and thrive in today's challenging market. CMMI is the de facto standard for organizational process improvement. 5 of 35

6 Process improvement and the CMMI What does "process improvement" really mean? A process can be defined as a set of practices performed to achieve a given purpose. It may include tools, methods, materials, and/or people. The basic underlying premise of process improvement is that, "The quality of a product is largely determined by the quality of the process used to develop and maintain it." This is why process improvement helps organizations reach that easier-said-than-done objective of working smarter: what you really need is a better process. The answer is rarely to just throw tools at the problem, as the tools should support or provide a framework that enables you to work smarter. The Capability Maturity Model A CMM is a Capability Maturity Model, a concept developed 20 years ago by the Software Engineering Institute. The U.S. Air Force needed to evaluate which software subcontractor candidates would be most likely to deliver the right products on time and at the right quality level. Following this premise, the Air Force decided that the more trustworthy organizations were those who followed a mature, documented set of practices. As part of the evaluation, different levels and key process areas were identified. While there are many levels and processes, there is no "ultimate" CMM process the CMM encourages organizations to determine what their processes are, document them, enforce them across all projects, and continuously improve them. Extra information on the CMM is available on-line on the SEI s web site ( Demonstrated success Very early on, the CMM demonstrated success. For example, Figure 1 - CMM implementation feedback from Boeing, 1997, shows that project effort predictions (how much time and money a project would cost) were often highly inaccurate, sometimes 140 percent off target. After implementing CMM level 3 practices, basing decisions on consistent rules and historical data, learning from previous projects, Boeing found that variance went down to +/- 20 percent, which is much more acceptable. An obvious conclusion is that better predictions and better planning lead to happier developers, happier project managers, and happier customers! 6 of 35

7 Figure 1 - CMM implementation feedback from Boeing, 1997 Now, 10 years later, let s examine some recent global statistics. Of the 878 organizations assessed by the SEI in 2005, two thirds reported an increase in productivity and half of them reported an increase in quality. This clearly illustrates what organizations can expect to achieve from their CMM implementation. When asked to measure the return on investment, the mean value reported was nearly 5 for one: all CMM investments have returned dividends: Some organizations have reported up to a 27 for 1 ROI! Improving quality does not have to be a cost; it can also help organizations be much more competitive. Numerous case studies quantify the proven benefits of CMMI: TATA Consultancy Services reported over 250 percent improvement in productivity over five quarters as the organization progressed toward and achieved CMMI maturity level 5. DB Systems measured that costs dropped 48 percent from a baseline prior to SW-CMM maturity level 2 as the organization moved toward CMMI maturity level 3. General Motors found that the percentage of milestones met improved from approximately 50 percent to approximately 85 percent following the organization's focus on CMMI 7 of 35

8 JPMorgan Chase noted an 80 percent reduction in post-release defects as the organization moved from SW-CMM level 1 to CMMI level 3 (40 percent, then 50 percent) Lockheed Martin Management and Data Systems saw their award fees increased by 55% between SW-CMM level 2 and CMMI level 5 The Raytheon Corporation reached a 6:1 ROI in a CMMI maturity level 3 organization The details of these studies as well as more feedback from other organizations are available on the SEI s Web site, We will now describe the CMM initiative, and how an organization can achieve these tangible benefits. The CMMI and its different representations Today, we talk about the CMMI, the integrated version of the CMM, which integrates the better elements of previous models, as well as feedback from over 20 years of experience across 5,000 organizations implementing its principles. Although it was originally born from the U.S. government and defense organizations, today 64 percent of organizations implementing the CMMI are global and outside of these market segments. The CMMI model heritage has two forms. The Software CMM had a staged model, in which organizations moved up a global step at a time. The Systems Engineering Capability Model used a continuous model in which organizations focused on a subset of process areas. A third model, the Integrated Product Development CMM, used a hybrid representation. Proponents for each type of representation were part of the CMMI development team, but as selecting a single representation approach became difficult, a compromise was made to initially support the two representations of the model, with equivalent content. The continuous model The continuous model provides maximum flexibility for organizations wishing to focus on specific process areas according to business goals and objectives. For example, a systems engineering organization may want to focus on requirements as the first step to process improvement. In this case, an organization could be CMMI level 5 for a single process area. This representation also starts individual capability levels at level zero ("incomplete"). 8 of 35

9 Figure 2 - CMMI continuous model 9 of 35

10 The staged model The staged model provides a roadmap for implementing groups of process areas in Maturity Levels, sequencing implementation in such a way that an organization can state that it is "CMMI level 2," for instance. Figure 3 - CMMI staged model Note that in 2005, 80 percent of assessments were "staged." The staged representation of the CMMI identifies five levels of process maturity for an organization: Level 1 is the Initial level and the starting point for use of a new process. All organizations start here. Level 2 is the Managed level, indicates that a process is used repeatedly, although different projects may be using different processes with little lesson learning. Level 3 is the Defined level (institutionalized), the organizational process is defined and confirmed as a standard business process. All projects use a process that is based on the corporate process rules. Level 4 is the Quantitatively Managed level, in which process management and measurement take place, enabling project managers to continually adjust. Level 5 is the Optimizing level, where process management includes deliberate process optimization and improvement the corporate process is continually optimized based on feedback from all projects. This helps reach the basic premise of the CMMI: "If you master your organizational process, you'll reduce risk and improve productivity." Key Process Areas Let s have a closer look at the CMMI practices with which today s technology can help. Levels 2 and 3 imply, among others, Requirement Management and Development, Change and Configuration Management, Quality assessment, Project Monitoring & Control, Metrics collection and display, Process & workflow definition and deployment 10 of 35

11 Engineering Requirements management Requirements development Technical solution Product integration Verification Validation Support Configuration management Process and product quality assurance Measurement and analysis Causal analysis and resolution Decision analysis and resolution Project management Project planning Project monitoring and control Supplier agreement management Integrated project management Risk management Quantitative project management Process management Organizational process focus Organizational process definition Organizational training Organizational process performance Organizational innovation and deployment 11 of 35

12 Implementing the CMMI process areas The CMMI is a collection of proven best practices that can be supported by many tools on the market; in many cases, tool support can make the difference between successful deployment and failure. Metrics that are not automatically captured and consolidated may be abandoned; building an enterprise-wide reference of causes of defects and their analysis is technically possible with paperwork, but expensive, poorly scalable and errorprone. While each key process area and practice can be treated as an island, the greatest benefits are realized when an integrated solution brings them together, providing consistency, cross-team process and more powerful analysis capabilities. These solutions, Integrated Lifecycle Solutions, can provide out-of-the-box processes for key CMMI activities to help organizations attain tangible benefits and a clear Return on Investment. We will now examine the CMMI key processes and illustrate how integrated lifecycle solutions can provide companies with a competitive edge. 12 of 35

13 Engineering Requirements management The first step in most process improvement initiatives is requirements management. Its purpose is to manage the requirements of the project s product and product components as well as to identify inconsistencies between those requirements and the project s plans and work products. This entails understanding the requirements, committing to them, managing changes to them, maintaining bidirectional traceability of requirements, and identifying inconsistencies between project work and requirements. A best practice for requirements management is to capture them in a central repository a system for capturing the business and system requirements where the team will be able to create and manage the bidirectional traceability of these requirements throughout the project. By managing history and baselines, teams can control scope creep and reach the understanding and commitment necessary to the requirements. The repository will also include a process for managing changes to requirements and assessing the impact of change. The repository helps users identify and avoid inconsistencies to ensure that all stakeholders, regardless of where they are situated, have access to the latest requirements. Figure 4 - Requirements management repository As a result, organizations are confident that all requirements are fulfilled, that every effort fulfils a requirement and that development resources are properly focused. The maintenance of the final system or product is much more efficient, simple and less costly. Requirements development Requirements development, the next step in managing requirements, aims to produce and analyze customer requirements as well as product and product-component 13 of 35

14 requirements. This addresses the needs of the relevant stakeholders, covering the product lifecycle phases (e.g. acceptance testing criteria), and product quality attributes (e.g. safety, reliability, maintainability), and constraints (e.g. legal aspects). The first step is to obtain customer requirements that constitute an understanding of what will satisfy stakeholders. These customer requirements are further refined into product and product-component requirements. The requirements are identified and refined throughout the phases of the product lifecycle. Design decisions, corrective actions, and feedback during each phase of the product s lifecycle are all analyzed for impact on derived and allocated requirements. The set of customer requirements to use in the development of product requirements, the set of product requirements to use in the design of products, and the decomposed, derived, understood and agreed on requirements, as well as the functional architecture, all need to be traced to each other. As organizations typically collect the customer's needs, captured "as-is", these needs undergo an internal translation to requirements in a format that meets the "good" requirements characteristics. They may also become more generic and less customer-specific (so the system can meet multiple customer needs). There is often a stable contractual agreement a legally binding third document. Organizations need to capture these levels of requirements, maintaining intelligent traceability and change impact analysis between them. Managing traceability between thousands of evolving requirements is impossible with paper or spreadsheet-based matrices. How can a team analyze the impact of an updated customer requirement? What if a feature turns out to be impossible to implement, how does this impact the contracts? End to end traceability Managing and visualizing this traceability requires a modern requirements management solution because it enables users to link requirements across multiple documents all stored in one central repository. This proves correct and full traceability, on line, live, without the need for generating documents or looking through pages of paperwork. Specifications and contractual documents can be generated from the requirements repository; this central location also maintains links to outside elements (e.g. customer documents, s, and contracts). By managing the multiple representations of customer needs, organizations improve their control over contractual agreements and increase the chance of project success. Developing customer requirements Capturing and developing customer requirements is a key stage for many organizations, which need to collect and combine many sources of information, identify and justify the best choices for the enterprise. This includes collecting information from the project stakeholders as well as customers, which implies a Web-based interface for a collaborative customer needs management process. This information should be combined with competitive information, product gap analysis, and cost vs. value vs. risk analysis. This enables organizations to leverage both quantitative and qualitative information from a single repository to make the best decisions about the scope and probable impact to the business of a project. 14 of 35

15 As the amount of information increases, the frequency of releases, business pressures, and market competition also increase. As such, the need for a powerful, yet easy-to use, integrated "control tower" becomes critical if an organization is to remain efficient and focused. This improvement in efficiency is one major step toward helping development teams gain greater confidence in the success of their projects well before any releases are planned and implementation begins. Figure 5 - Customer needs analysis Integrated lifecycle solutions provide a critical layer of prioritization, decision-making, and release planning capabilities that help all stakeholders in a project team quickly zero in on what is most important to their customers and target market. Visualization tools enable managers to run "what-if" scenarios showing potential outcomes of different decisions on product features, such as value to customers, release schedule impact, required resources, and competitive advantage. This provides a controlled, repeatable process for customer needs capturing and project planning, a critical step for all projects where managers can be held accountable for deciding on the wrong path. This enables management to determine early in the development process what is most important to customers, allowing them to formulate and follow a clearly defined plan, accelerate timeto-market, and increase revenue. Visual requirements modeling Most requirements analysts find augmenting textual requirements with modeling helpful, whether this means drawing pictures on a white board, utilizing presentation tools such as Microsoft PowerPoint, or simply creating a mental model. These representations should be managed alongside the requirements to ensure consistency, traceability, and change control. Visual requirements modeling provides a simple and powerful way to communicate with, and elicit requirements from, customers and end users. It also helps clarify requirements and create a common understanding between all development team members and stakeholders. Although models and images should not replace clear, 15 of 35

16 unambiguous textual requirements, by empowering visual requirements, organizations increase communication and collaboration for all stakeholders. Visual requirements modeling also bridges the gap to the definition of functionality, or "functional analysis" (this is not the same as structured analysis in software development and does not presume a functionally oriented software design. In object-oriented software design, it relates to defining the services). With the same tools and while retaining full traceability, analysts can work on the definition of functions, their logical groupings, and their association with requirements, what is generally referred to as a "functional architecture." Analyses occur recursively at successively more detailed layers of a product s architecture until sufficient detail is available to enable detailed design, acquisition, and testing of the product to proceed. Figure 6 - Visual requirements modeling This traceability and visibility greatly facilitates the implementation of this CMMI key process area. Involvement of relevant stakeholders in both requirements development and analysis gives them visibility into the evolution of requirements. This activity continually assures them that the requirements are being properly defined. Managing requirements change As organizations strive to stay agile and adapt to changing market needs, competitive landscapes, evolving technologies, corporate priorities; and increasing regulations, change becomes a major threat to any set of requirements. At the same time, teams that can master changing requirements will have a clear competitive advantage. 16 of 35

17 Requirements management solutions provide functionality to help you stay in control of requirements change, from visual indicators that a link needs to be checked for impact, to complete impact analysis displays along the cascade of documents. This reduces the effort of managing an evolving set of requirements and ensures that all team members, wherever they are located, are on the same page. Nothing is missed, which increases team confidence that there will be no last-minute panicking and rework. A completely customizable, global change and approval process can be configured. We will examine this in more detail later on in this paper. Technical solution Building the technical solution is the following engineering step, where teams design, develop, and implement solutions to requirements. These solutions, designs, and implementations encompass products, product components, and product related lifecycle processes either singly or in combinations, as appropriate. The team should develop Alternative Solutions and Selection Criteria, evolve Operational Concepts and Scenarios and select Product-Component Solutions appropriately. They can then develop the Design, establish interface descriptions, perform Make, Buy, or Reuse Analyses and so on. Once the choices have been made, documented and traced back, the team can implement the Product Design. One common language: UML/SysML Organizations have traditionally used completely different languages and representations to describe the different steps of requirements analysis and validation, functional architecture, design and implementation. This led to misunderstanding, loss of traceability and poor reaction to change. Today s best practice is to use a common visual modeling language across the lifecycle, called the Unified Modeling Language (UML ). Models created early on to describe usage scenarios with the customer can be extended, enhanced, and detailed to analyze alternative designs, describe tests, and ultimately, generate the final application. This unifies Requirement Driven Development and Model Driven Development in a seamless process. 17 of 35

18 By providing high-speed visual systems and software engineering, based on an industrystandard visual language, organizations can improve productivity by solving problems at a higher level, increase quality by automating manual and error-prone activities, improve communication, simplify project management and promote re-use. As future projects follow the same CMMI process, they will be able to quickly understand, learn and re-use from existing investments. Requirements Driven Development In a CMMI process, requirements drive the development. Requirements Driven Development ensures that all prioritized internal and external requirements remain persistent and auditable throughout every phase of the development process. In particular, RDD links the complete requirements process with the entire product development lifecycle while integrating, automating, and accelerating the engineering process. The complete traceability, from customer needs to the final product, enhances communication and visibility across the extended project team, as priorities and changes are clear. This avoids unnecessary project rework and inadequate development. With greater visibility and real-time status reporting, confidence in cost and schedule is enhanced. 18 of 35

19 Figure 7 - Complete requirements traceability A Requirements Driven Development process is the key to success for CMMI implementation and its return on investment. Verification and validation Verification and validation are twin practices that mirror the requirements. Although they re often confused, they do not answer the same question. Verification aims at ensuring that the team produces what they were told to produce, that the working products meet their specified requirements. Did you build the product right? That is, did you meet the requirements specification? It is clear that verification is an internal check and proves that our requirements analysis and technical solution implementation traceability is correct. As such, verification will be highly facilitated by the process improvement steps we have previously mentioned. Validation aims at demonstrating that the product fulfills its intended use when placed in its intended environment. Did you build the right product? That is, did you meet the operational need? Although the validation activities use approaches similar to verification (such as test, analysis, inspection, demonstration, or simulation), the end users are often involved in the validation activities. Validation will be facilitated by the early effort put into customer needs capturing and analysis, and visual requirements modeling. Aligning requirements and tests An efficient way of both implementing good verification and validation, as well as writing better requirements, is to ensure that requirements are clearly mapped to test cases as 19 of 35

20 early on as possible. Making sure that each requirement is clearly verifiable from the start not only helps prepare later phases of the project, it also puts the writer in the correct state of mind. Note that this is true for the nominal functional mode (making sure the system or software does what it s supposed to do). Requirements and their associated tests must also indicate what the system should not do, and what happens at the limits (degraded mode). This best practice also applies to constraints (non-functional requirements), indicating how they shall be tested is a good way to write better requirements. For instance, how would we test the following requirement: "The software must be highly usable?" A better requirement would be: "An untrained user will be able to generate a report in less than 3 minutes," for instance. Organizations that ensure their requirements are clearly testable early on in the process improve project success rates and enhance quality. The ability to capture, trace, and even enforce this practice is yet another strength of integrated lifecycle solutions. Additional engineering process areas While not directly implemented by integrated lifecycle solutions, product integration greatly benefits from the improvements to effort, collaboration, communication, and traceability that Requirements Driven Development makes possible. A notable exception is software development, where integration is greatly aided by an advanced configuration management solution. 20 of 35

21 Support process areas Configuration management Configuration management is the first of the supporting process areas. Its purpose is to establish and maintain the integrity of work products using configuration identification, control, status accounting, and audits. Organizations do this by establishing baselines, tracking and controlling changes, and establishing and maintaining the integrity of the work products. These typically include process descriptions, requirements, design, test plans and procedures, test results and interface descriptions. Going beyond basic CM Configuration Management is the process backbone for software development teams as it coordinates changes, versions and configurations and brings distributed teams together. Software configuration management systems can automate most manual and mundane activities. When integrated with change management systems, teams have a central repository in which to implement a repeatable process across the organization for change control not only for software, but all configuration items. Let us analyze a few of the specific benefits that Configuration Management can bring to a CMMI deployment. Advanced configuration management systems not only track configuration items, but also the work orders and the implementation assignments, the "tasks" that result in software creation and modification. Once tasks are created and assigned, developers see them as a to-do list. Developers then just indicate which task they re working on, and the system creates the traceability automatically. The task comprises a consistent set of changes and helps other team members understand the reason for change. In this way, development activities are automatically related to customer needs, latest decisions, and priorities. Round-trip traceability Software development teams need to report on the content and integrity of configurations, builds, and baselines. Advanced software configuration management products can list all requirements and changes that are actually implemented, as well as those that are only partially implemented. This provides teams with total control over which changes are implemented and enables configuration auditing. Testing and QA teams can quickly see which features and fixes should be tested for. Consistent change sets can also be backed out if necessary. 21 of 35

22 Figure 8 - Round-trip traceability Software configuration management helps organizations improve quality, time-to-market and productivity far beyond the "minimal" expectations of the CMMI. Process and product quality assurance Process and product quality assurance aims to provide staff and management with objective insight into processes and associated work products, including: objectively evaluating performed processes, work products, and services against the applicable process descriptions, standards, and procedures identifying and documenting noncompliance issues providing feedback on the results of QA activities ensuring that noncompliance issues are addressed Objectivity in process and product quality assurance evaluations is critical to the success of the project. Objective quality assessment of software products can be implemented easily with the right solutions. Automated Quality Assessment solutions can check coding rules are followed and produce objective audits on the software code based on the organization s metrics. Test coverage can also be assessed and continuously improved. 22 of 35

23 Figure 9 - Objective quality assessment Based on project feedback and process analysis, the organizational quality model should evolve to continuously improve. Causal analysis and resolution Causal analysis and resolution identifies causes of defects and other problems and takes action to prevent them from occurring in the future. This practice improves quality and productivity by preventing the introduction of defects into a product proactively. Organizations must select defect data and analyze it to determine causes, then address the causes of these defects. After the action, proposals are implemented, and the effect of these changes is evaluated over time and recorded. In many organizations, mistakes are repeated without anyone knowing, or sometimes not caring. Causal analysis and resolution activities are a mechanism for communicating lessons learned among projects. For instance, organizations will wish to track defects reported by the customer, by the end user and those found during peer reviews and in testing. Enterprise Change Management To implement this best practice, organizations need to capture defect data in a consistent, centralized fashion. Enterprise Change Management, the cornerstone for sustainable compliance, as well as causal analysis and resolution, enables organizations to implement a repeatable, documented and reliable process for capturing both defect data and change requests of all types, on software and hardware, from customers and the internal teams, urgent and minor. By offering a Web interface, ECM solutions ensure ease of adoption across the enterprise. This best practice does more than ensure no defects are forgotten and that priorities are respected. The collected data can be analyzed to identify trends and causes to ensure future projects learn from past mistakes. Quality is increased not only on the current project, but on the complete process with this corporate knowledge database. 23 of 35

24 Figure 10 - Enterprise Change Request Integrated defect management One barrier to effective defect data analysis and guaranteeing consistency of information and process is the multiplicity of defect repositories. Testing teams may use their specific tools, while customer feedback may be captured in a CRM system. By providing open interfaces and automated synchronization, Enterprise Change Management solutions serve as a change backbone that brings the organization together, so that issues identified by one team are sent for analysis and resolution as soon as possible, without any loss of information or traceability. Likewise, updates and status reports can be automatically sent back to the source. Not only does this integration ensure nothing is lost on a given project, it also centralizes the defect data for efficient casual analysis and trend reports, allowing organizations to identify issues in the team process. Requirements change control Requirements are also subject to continual change. As a project progresses, most organizations need to remain agile, adapt to engineering imperatives, and respond to evolving market situations and customer needs. Writing a perfect first requirement is insufficient if its evolution is not well-managed poorly controlled change can lead to inadequate systems and software, rework effort, and loss of revenue. Organizations need to implement a reliable and repeatable change control process that helps turn this challenge into an opportunity. As a result, they ll be more competitive, control schedules, and respond to evolving customer needs. This process should be available to all relevant stakeholders and support capturing, analyzing, and approving changes to requirements as well as links. Such a process enables organizations to maintain the voice of the customer throughout the development lifecycle by providing a consistent, repeatable, centralized change control process and audit trail for change requests including requirements changes, defects, issues, and approvals. 24 of 35

25 Figure 11 - Requirement change request Integrated lifecycle solutions ensure that the foundation step of a CMMI engineering process, the requirements, are also taken into account by causal analysis and resolution an activity that can have an extremely high return on investment for all organizations as they learn to get requirements right the first time, as well as manage continual change. Measurement and analysis The purpose of measurement and analysis is to develop and sustain a measurement capability to support management information needs. The objectives of measurement and analysis must be aligned with identified information needs and objectives. Not only must organizations specify the measures, they must also identify the data collection and storage mechanisms, analysis techniques, as well as reporting and feedback mechanisms. After implementing the collection, storage, analysis, and reporting of the data, the objective results can be used to make informed decisions, and take appropriate corrective actions. This helps objective planning and estimating, tracking actual performance against established plans and objectives, identifying and resolving process-related issues, and providing a basis for incorporating measurement into additional future processes. To provide management with high-level status information to determine how the development team is performing against its objectives, integrated lifecycle solutions capture, cross-analyze and display alerts and metrics to help track deadlines, requirements, project assignments, and other key information. Managers can gain an understanding of each step in the process and how well the process itself functions. Regular alerts help project managers react more quickly to slippage in schedules or budgets and make course corrections before it is too late. Ideally, to guarantee crossproject analysis, these objective metrics should be based on agreed upon collection methods and calculations for the whole organization. 25 of 35

26 Figure 12 - Measurement dashboard The initial focus for measurement activities is at the project level. However, a measurement capability may prove useful for addressing organizational - and/or enterprise-wide information needs. Integrated lifecycle solutions enable projects to store data and results in the organization s measurement repository for future reference. Additional support process areas The remaining support process area can also be aided by integrated lifecycle solutions in many cases. Decision Analysis and Resolution, analyzing possible decisions using a formal evaluation process, evaluating identified alternatives against established criteria for instance, can be helped by using the analysis and traceability features of requirements management solutions. A typical example is Tender Assessment Management, where initial requirements have to be traced to supplier or subcontractor offerings, weighted and scored, to produce an objective, quantified and recorded decision. Many organizations also use the portfolio analysis capabilities of integrated lifecycle solutions to quantify and visually analyze both opportunities and risks, as described in "Developing customer requirements". These solutions can help automate the decision analysis process. 26 of 35

27 Project Management Project monitoring and control Project monitoring and control provides management with an understanding of the project s progress so that they can take appropriate corrective actions when the project s performance deviates significantly from the plan. Progress is primarily determined by comparing actual work product and task attributes, effort, cost, and schedule to the plan at prescribed milestones or control levels within the project schedule or work breakdown structure. Appropriate visibility enables timely corrective action to be taken when performance deviates significantly from the plan. An unresolved deviation is significant when it precludes the project from meeting its objectives. When actual status deviates significantly from the expected values, corrective actions are taken as appropriate. Management by exception Today s complex projects demand automated data collection and reporting facilities to streamline project management. Integrated lifecycle solutions provide project managers and all stakeholders with the "management dashboard" of metrics and trends that enables them to quickly monitor project activities such as the progress, growth, and volatility of requirements, implementation of features and resolution of defects. Project managers can focus on decision-making instead of manually gathering data and compiling reports. Most importantly, as the display of key monitoring information is at a high level, it allows users to manage by exception and spot trouble areas quickly. For instance, a high change frequency on a specific requirement or a whole sub-system may indicate that the requirement needs to be revisited with the customer. A large amount of rework on implementation may point to poorly specified original requirements. Figure 13 - Trend analysis Integrated lifecycle solutions provide trends that can be compiled from past systems and software projects to form a knowledgebase of best practices. Tracking and analyzing 27 of 35

28 trends is a key practice of CMMI levels 4 and 5 that continually improves the organization s process. Monitoring project progress vs. the plan Integrated lifecycle solutions also help monitor the project progress, comparing actual requirements implementation effort, cost, and schedule with the plan. By continually synchronizing and mapping the project plan and work breakdown structure with the requirements, teams ensure that all project goals are planned and resourced, enable assessment of the impact of requested changes on the plan, and enable assessment of the impact of schedule or resource changes on the requirements. Figure 14 - Project plan monitoring Additional project management process areas Although they mainly imply setting up processes and using specific tools, the remaining project management process area can also be aided by integrated lifecycle solutions. Project Monitoring and Control, as described in the previous paragraph, indicates that actual performance and progress of the project should be monitored against the project plan, and appropriate corrective actions can be taken when needed. These plans are established and maintained following recommendations of the Project Planning process area. Project plans should be maintained in a project management solution: Telelogic Lifecycle Solutions integrate with most available products. Supplier Agreement Management covers the acquisition of products from suppliers, evaluation of the proposals and acceptance of the products. Analyzing possible decisions using a formal evaluation process, like tracking and evaluating identified alternatives against established criteria for instance, can be helped by using the analysis and traceability features of requirements management solutions. A typical example is Tender Assessment Management, where initial supplier requirements have to be traced to the proposals, weighted and scored, to produce an objective, quantified, and recorded decision. The quality of the delivered product also can be aided, in the case of software, by automated QA solutions. These can perform an audit of the code and produce an objective assessment of the delivery, which will enable acceptance. Metrics will pinpoint 28 of 35

29 the maintainability of the final product, for instance; the acceptance thresholds of these metrics should be specified in the supplier agreement. Integrated Project Management establishes and manages the project and the involvement of the relevant stakeholders with regard to coordination and collaboration. Enterprise Change Management, Requirements-Driven Development, and advanced metrics and reporting all contribute to improving coordination and collaboration for all stakeholders. In order to establish a Risk Management strategy, organizations must collect, quantify, analyze, and decide which risk management actions should be implemented, based on budgets, resources, and time. This activity can be aided by use of the portfolio analysis capabilities of integrated lifecycle solutions to quantify and visually analyze both opportunities and risks, as described in "Developing customer requirements." These solutions can help automate the risk analysis and decision taking process. In particular, it ensures that all stakeholders can provide auditable feedback, for future reference and process improvement. Quantitative Project Management helps organizations achieve the project s established quality and process-performance objectives. Integrated lifecycle solutions provide reports, metrics, and dashboard indicators that help implement this process area successfully, as described in Management by exception, Measurement and and Enterprise Change Management 29 of 35

30 Process Management As we have seen, integrated lifecycle solutions can help with many key areas of a CMMI initiative, in particular for Engineering and Support process area categories. One category that is frequently overlooked, because it addresses different teams, is Process Management. This paper now examines how today s best practices can help improve quality and productivity here too. Organizational process focus, definition, performance, innovation and deployment Organizations should plan and implement organizational process improvement based on a thorough understanding of the current strengths and weaknesses of its processes and process assets. The process asset library is a collection of items maintained for use by the people and projects. The set of standard processes is tailored by projects to create their defined processes. The organization should establish and maintain a quantitative understanding of the performance of the set of standard processes in support of quality and process-performance objectives, and to provide the process performance data, baselines, and models to quantitatively manage projects. It should select and deploy incremental and innovative improvements that measurably improve both processes and technologies. The improvements support the organization's quality and processperformance objectives as derived from the organization's business objectives - improve product quality, increase productivity, decrease time to market, etc. These different process areas combine to ensure the organization has an everimproving set of standard processes, with quantified data, that help project managers understand performance and what steps are needed to improve. Actionable Architecture As a key component of integrated lifecycles solutions for the CMMI, Enterprise Architecture solutions enable organizations to describe, verify, improve and document their organizational processes. The process descriptions, associated performance data and improvement steps can be presented in a Web browser across an intranet for easy education and deployment. 30 of 35

31 Figure 15 - Capturing organizational processes To simplify the creation of a complete organizational process, special interest groups have been created to deliver an exemplary and extensible process foundation and tools to extend that foundation; the EPF (Eclipse Process Framework), for instance, is aimed at processes for all types of software and systems development. Telelogic is the lead for the Requirements Management and Change Management Special Interest Groups, both critical CMMI process areas. TOGAF is good example of a framework for Enterprise Architecture which provides a comprehensive approach to the design, planning, implementation, and governance of your enterprise information architecture. Organizational training Organizational training is implemented to develop the skills and knowledge of people so they can perform their roles effectively and efficiently. This is a key step in supporting both the organization s strategic business objectives as well as the tactical training needs that are common across projects and support groups. As such, it is critical that solutions rolled out across the organization take into account the training factor. High training costs can stop a solution from being rolled out, and if end user acceptance is not high, the process itself is at a risk. Two solutions to facilitate organizational training are Web interfaces and automated systems. A Web browser is a interface common to most users which has the advantage of low deployment costs. For solutions that will be rolled out across many casual users in a distributed enterprise, in particular outside the software specialists team management reporting or defect submission, for example Web interfaces can limit training costs and ensure easier acceptance. Other operations can be simplified with automation. Version control of files, for example, can be controlled by services that run in the background, much like an anti-virus system. These solutions make it easier to achieve the organizational training goals. 31 of 35

32 Best practices for process improvement Today s best practices help organizations implement CMMI processes and achieve a return on investment, including Requirement Driven Development, Enterprise Change Management, complete integration with requirements management, Testing, Project Management, out-of-the-box, automated processes, as well as process modeling and simulation. By implementing integrated lifecycle solutions, organizations can take a fast and sure route to improving productivity, quality as well as demonstrating an important return on investment. It is interesting to note that the same solutions are also invaluable in managing the rollout of your CMMI deployment. Requirements management solutions can be used to trace your progress towards CMMI key process area compliance, providing traceability from the goals to the initiatives put in place. Telelogic Lifecycle Solutions for the CMMI Telelogic has an integrated lifecycle solution that helps you implement all the best practices we covered in this white paper, including: requirements management and development, UML 2.0 technical solution implementation, integrated with verification and validation solutions, enterprise change management and configuration management as well as quality assessment, metrics and reporting - all integrated into a full requirements driven development solution. An actionable architecture of the organizational process completes this suite, which includes flexible token-based licensing to allow you to use the tools you need, when you need them. Telelogic s experienced professional services are available to help your organization succeed the first time and achieve the expected return on investment. The table below indicates which components of Telelogic Lifecycle Solutions address the CMMI key process areas and best practices. CMMI key process area and best practices Requirements management Requirements development End to end traceability Developing customer requirements Visual requirements modeling Managing requirements change Technical solution One common language: UML/SysML Telelogic Lifecycle Solutions capability Telelogic DOORS Telelogic DOORS Telelogic DOORS Telelogic FocalPoint Telelogic DOORS Telelogic DOORS Telelogic System Architect, Telelogic TAU and Telelogic Rhapsody Telelogic System Architect, Telelogic TAU and Telelogic Rhapsody 32 of 35