Stretching Agile to fit CMMI Level 3

Short Description
Agile practitioners pride themselves on highly productive, responsive, low ceremony, lightweight, tacit knowledge processes with little waste, adaptive planning and frequent iterative delivery of value. It is often assumed that CMMI compliant processes need to be heavyweight, bureaucratic, slow moving, high ceremony and plan driven. Agile developers often skeptically perceive formal process improvement initiatives as management generated inefficiency that gets in the way of productivity. At Microsoft, we’ve adopted the teachings of W. Edwards Deming and stretched our MSF for Agile Software Development method to fit the requirements for CMMI Level 3. The resultant MSF for CMMI Process Improvement is a highly iterative, adaptive planning method, light on documentation, and heavily automated through tooling. It enables management and organization of software engineering through use of agile metrics such as velocity and cumulative flow but with an added dimension of an understanding of variation – adapted from Deming’s teachings. This is the story of how mixing Deming with Agile produced a lightweight CMMI solution for .Net developers everywhere.

Website: www.agilemanagement.net | Filesize: 341kb
No of Page(s): 9

Content
…
Many software developers are suspicious of process generally. Process often gets in their way and slows the pace of software development to a frustrating level. The CMMI is associated in their minds with such process initiatives. We arrived at the start of the MSF for CMMI® Process Improvement [Microsoft 2005a] method project with similar prejudices.
To provide some background, Microsoft Consulting Services has offered training in project management under the brand Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) since 1992. MSF has a long history and a body of knowledge built up over more than a decade. MSF v3.0 incorporated learning from within Microsoft and external sources. It incorporated a lot of established late 20th century management science and embraced the concepts of team accountability, shared responsibility, empowerment, delegation, systems thinking and many other aspects of general management practice. MSF doesn’t look much like traditional software engineering project management guidance. In many respects it is very agile. The MSF v4.0 team had to respect the history of MSF whilst trying to create a method which would meet the CMMI requirements.
…

Get the file Download here