An approach for using CMMI in agile software development assessments: Experiences from three case studies

Software development organizations are increasingly interested in the possibility of adopting agile development methods. Organizations that have been employing the Capability Maturity Model (CMM/CMMI) for making improvements are now changing their software development processes towards agility. By deploying agile methods, these organizations are making an investment the success of which needs to be proven. However, CMMI does not always support interpretations in an agile context. Consequently, assessments should be implemented in a manner that takes the agile context into account, while still producing useful results. This paper proposes an approach for agile software development assessment using CMMI and describes how this approach was used for software process improvement purposes in organizations that had either been planning to use or were using agile software development methods.