24-Nov-2005

Problems with CMMI

Juan Palacio in Navegapolis posts a link to the article, CMM(I) Problems, in which Nick Barlow lists a number of problems with the CMMI and the process of certification.

In common with many things in business and in life, the software maturity of a company cannot be measured. However, there is a fashion and an imperative in business and pseudo-science for imposing numbers on everything - you can't change/improve/control what you cannot measure. This results in a set of things that can be measured which are then considered to be a surrogate for the subject of interest, in our case the software maturity of a company. Once we have a number, people choose to forget how meaningless it really is and give it an importance way beyond the original intent. In the case of things that cannot be measured, there is no substitute for subjective assessment by qualified and experienced people - the only problem is that the 'other pseudo-scientific process' has reduced the supply of such people and their judgement is no longer valued.