Now more than ever, companies want to deliver products and services better, faster, and cheaper. At the same time, in the high-technology environment of the twenty-first century, nearly all organizations have found themselves building increasingly complex products and services. It is unusual today for a single organization to develop all the components that compose a complex product or service. More commonly, some components are built in-house and some are acquired; then all the components are integrated into the final product or service. Organizations must be able to manage and control this complex development and maintenance process.

The problems these organizations address today involve enterprise-wide solutions that require an integrated approach. Effective management of organizational assets is critical to business success. In essence, these organizations are product and service developers that need a way to manage their development activities as part of achieving their business objectives.

In the current marketplace, maturity models, standards, methodologies, and guidelines exist that can help an organization improve the way it does business. However, most available improvement approaches focus on a specific part of the business and do not take a systemic approach to the problems that most organizations are facing. By focusing on improving one area of a business, these models have unfortunately perpetuated the stovepipes and barriers that exist in organizations.

CMMI^® for Development (CMMI-DEV) provides an opportunity to avoid or eliminate these stovepipes and barriers. CMMI for Development consists of best practices that address development activities applied to products and services. It addresses practices that cover the product’s lifecycle from conception through delivery and maintenance. The emphasis is on the work necessary to build and maintain the total product.

CMMI-DEV contains 22 process areas. Of those process areas, 16 are core process areas, 1 is a shared process area, and 5 are development specific process areas.[1]

All CMMI-DEV model practices focus on the activities of the developer organization. Five process areas focus on practices specific to development: addressing requirements development, technical solution, product integration, verification, and validation.