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CMMI® (Capability Maturity Model Integration) is a process improvement approach that provides organizations with best practices of efficient and effective processes. It can be used to guide process improvement across a project, a department, or an entire organization. CMMI set process improvement goals and priorities, provides guidance for quality processes, helps to integrate traditionally separate disciplines and can be a reference for assessing processes.

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CMMI is a model that consists of best practices for system and software development and maintenance. It was developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at the Carnegie-Mellon University in the U.S.A.
Although it originally was started for software development (Sw-CMM), the improved CMMI-model has been made generic to be used for all disciplines (e.g. software, firmware, hardware, mechanical).
The CMMI-model is not a ‘theoretical’ model, but based on established ‘best-practices’ within a lot of companies.

The CMMI-model can be used for all kinds of enterprises (small, large, medical, consumer, automotive, … ) and will then lead to a variety of different quality systems.
CMMI is being adopted worldwide, including North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, and Africa. (reference to article of EvN)
Organizations cannot be CMMI “certified”. Instead, an organization can be assessed and will be awarded with a 1-5 level rating.

This introduction gives a first impression and is not meant to be comprehensive. The complete CMMI-model is made available by the SEI in MS-Word format: CMMI-1.3

® CMM and CMMI are registered in the US Patent and Trademark Office by Carnegie Mellon University

Category: CMMI Introduction