SPPM Unit-1

Short and Long Questions

1. Define Software Maturity Framework.

The software process capability of an organization provides one means of

predicting the most likely outcomes to be expected from the
next software project the organization undertakes. ... Software process
maturity is the extent to which a specific process is explicitly defined, managed,
measured, controlled, and effective.

2.Describe about Process assessment.

The process is assessed to evaluate methods, tools, and practices, which are used to
develop and test the software. The aim of process assessment is to identify the areas
for improvement and suggest a plan for making that improvement. 

3. Define Repeatable process.

In project management, a repeatable process is a set of actions that can be easily

duplicated. 

In this context, a repeatable process in an information technology (IT) project can be

a business process, a workflow schematic, a template, a programming instantiation or
a reusable program component. Repeatable processes allow a project team to make
efficient use of project components that have proved to be successful in the past and
reduce unnecessary variations that can tie up time, effort and budget.

4. Define the software process change

When a software process is changed, all the elements of a software process such as
activity, artifact, and role are subject to change. Changing an element may affect
others because of relationships between the elements. For example, changing an
activity may affect the artifacts produced by the activity.

5. Desribe about the Defined process.

A process with a well-defined set of steps. Given the same inputs, a defined

process should produce the same output every time (within a defined variance
range). Defined Process · A well-ordered and structured process can greatly improve
the efficiency and effectiveness of purely routine tasks. 

6. Describe various Process Assessments

A software assessment (or audit) can be of three types.

 A self-assessment (first-party assessment) is performed internally by an organization's

own personnel.

 A second-party assessment is performed by an external assessment team or the

organization is assessed by a customer.

 A third-party assessment is performed by an external party or (e.g., a supplier being

assessed by a third party to verify its ability to enter contracts with a customer).

7. Elaborate about the Optimizing process

Process optimization is the discipline of adjusting a process so as to optimize

(make the best or most effective use of) some specified set of parameters
without violating some constraint. The most common goals are minimizing
cost and maximizing throughput and/or efficiency. This is one of the
major quantitative tools in industrial decision making.

8. Describe PSP.

Personal software process (PSP), is designed to assist software developers in using

sound engineering practices. PSP shows software developers how to plan and track
their projects, use a measured and defined process, establish goals, and track their
performance against these goals. PSP assists engineers in managing software quality
from the start of a project to completion, analyzing the results of each task and using
the results to improve the software process of the next project.

Additionally, PSP concentrates more on the work of individual engineers. It extends an

improvement process to practicing engineers. The fundamental principle behind PSL is
producing quality software systems. Thus, every engineer working on a network must do high-
quality work.

Objectives of Personal Software Process

The aim of PSP is providing software developers with disciplined methods and strategies for
improving personal software development processes. PSP assists software engineers to:

o Improve their planning and estimating skills.

o Make commitments and schedules they can keep and meet.
o Reduce defects in their projects.
o Manage the quality of their plans.

Principles of Personal Software Process

The design of PSP is based on these planning and quality principles:

o Every engineer is different. For software engineers to become more active, they should
plan their work and base these plans on their personal data.
o To improve their performance, software engineers should personally use regular and
well-defined processes.
o For software engineers to produce quality software products, they should feel personally
responsible for the quality of the products they are making. Superior software products
are never created by mistake but by striving to do quality work.
o It’s cheaper to trace and fix defects earlier than later.
o It’s easier to prevent errors than finding and fixing them.
o The cheapest and fastest way to do any task is doing it in the right direction.

Doing a software engineering project the right way requires engineers to plan before committing
or starting to work on a project. They must use a well-defined process when planning their work.
For them to understand their performance, they must measure time spent on each step of a
project, defects injected and removed, and the size of the software products they produce.

Thus, the personal software process ensures that engineers plan, measure and track the quality of
products. It also ensures that engineers focus on quality from the start of a project to the end with
the aim of producing high-quality software. In other words, PSP provides software engineers
with a self-directed and disciplined personal framework for doing quality work.
 9. Define CMM

The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) is a methodology used to develop and refine an
organization's software development process. The model describes a five-level evolutionary path
of increasingly organized and systematically more mature processes. CMM was developed and is
promoted by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), a research and development center
sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). SEI was founded in 1984 to address
software engineering issues and, in a broad sense, to advance software engineering
methodologies. More specifically, SEI was established to optimize the process of developing,
acquiring, and maintaining heavily software-reliant systems for the DoD. Because the processes
involved are equally applicable to the software industry as a whole, SEI advocates industry-wide
adoption of the CMM.

The CMM is similar to ISO 9001, one of the ISO 9000 series of standards specified by the
International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The ISO 9000 standards specify an
effective quality system for manufacturing and service industries; ISO 9001 deals specifically
with software development and maintenance. The main difference between the two systems lies
in their respective purposes: ISO 9001 specifies a minimal acceptable quality level for software
processes, while the CMM establishes a framework for continuous process improvement and is
more explicit than the ISO standard in defining the means to be employed to that end.

CMM's Five Maturity Levels of Software Processes

 At the initial level, processes are disorganized, even chaotic. Success is likely to depend on

individual efforts, and is not considered to be repeatable, because processes would not be
sufficiently defined and documented to allow them to be replicated.

 At the repeatable level, basic project management techniques are established, and successes

could be repeated, because the requisite processes would have been made established,
defined, and documented.
 At the defined level, an organization has developed its own standard software process through
greater attention to documentation, standardization, and integration.

 At the managed level, an organization monitors and controls its own processes through data
collection and analysis.

 At the optimizing level, processes are constantly being improved through monitoring

feedback from current processes and introducing innovative processes to better serve the
organization's particular needs.

2. What is Team Software Process?

The success of an organization that produces software-intensive systems mainly

depends on a well-managed software development process. Implementing disciplined
and quality software methods are often challenging. Organizations always want to
know what their software development teams are doing, but they find themselves
struggling with how to do it.

Team Software Process (TSP) comes in handy to offer operational procedures and strategies that
assist engineers and managers organize projects effectively and produce quality software using
disciplined software process methods. TSP is used in combination with personal software
process (PSP) at individual and team levels. Organizations implemented TSP experience
significant improvements in the overall quality of their software products. They also experience
reduced schedule deviation.

Overview

The primary objective of TSP is creating a team environment that supports disciplined work
while still building and maintaining a self-directed team. TSP guides a team in addressing
essential business needs of schedule management, cycle-time reduction, effective quality
management, and better cost management. It defines a product framework of customizable
software processes and introduces strategies that include training for engineers and managers,
building management sponsorship, automated tool support, mentoring, and coaching.
Team software process can be applied in all aspects of software development, that is
requirements analysis and definition, design, implementation, testing, and maintenance.
Additionally, TSP can also be used to support multidisciplinary teams ranging from a team of
two engineers to a team of hundreds of engineers. It can also be used in developing different
software products ranging from embedded real-time control systems to commercial client-server
applications.

What Makes TSP Work?

Typical software projects tend to be late, difficult to track, over budget, and of poor quality.
Software development teams often have unrealistic schedules and deadlines dictated to them.
They’re required to use imposed standards, tools and process. They find themselves taking
shortcuts to meet tight schedule pressures. Only a few teams can work successfully and
consistently in such environments. As software systems become more complex such problems
get worse than before. Moreover, teams have to consider customer desires, technical capability,
and business needs.

To balance all these pressures and conflicting forces and handling software development projects
a team has to be self-directed. A self-directed team should have these qualities:

o Understands product and business goals

o Produces their own plans for addressing the goals
o Makes their personal commitments
o Directs their own projects
o Consistently uses processes and methods that they select
o Manages quality.

Team software process builds and maintains self-directed teams. A successful self-
directed team requires capable and skilled team members. Their commitment,
discipline, and skills come together to produce high-quality software. Therefore,
high-quality software products are a team effort. TSP creates an environment that
supports disciplined and self-directed teamwork
 3. Write five frame work activities of PSP.

There are five framework activities defined in PSP. These activities are planning , High-level
design, high-level design review, development and postmortem

Planning : Planning activity is useful to isolate requirements of process, and ,based on

these requirements it develops both size & resource estimate. In addition, it defect estimate
i.e it calculate the number of defects projected for work. All metrics are recorded on
worksheet or templates. Finally development task are identified & project schedule is
created.

High level design : External specifications for each components to be constructed are
developed & a component design is created. Prototype are built when uncertainty exists.
All related issues are recorded and tracked.

High level design review : Formal verification method are applied to uncover errors in the
design . Metrics are maintained for all important task & work result.

Development : In this phase, the component level design is refined & review. Code is
generated , reviewed , compiled and tested. metrics are maintained for all important task &
work results.

Postmortem : Postmortem is an activity , which does significant analysis. using measures

and metrics collected from previous phases, the effectiveness of the process is find out. It is
necessary that measure & metrics should provide guidelines for updating the process to
improve the effectiveness of a process.
PSP is well disciplined & metrics – based approach to software engineering. When
software professionals are properly trained for PSP, the result is an improvement in
productivity and quality of software engineering  products.
The scope of PSP is not wide throughout the industry. The reasons behind this is human
nature and organizational inertia.

4. What is mean by project management?

Project management is the application of processes, methods, skills, knowledge and experience
to achieve specific project objectives according to the project acceptance criteria within agreed
parameters. Project management has final deliverables that are constrained to a finite timescale
and budget.

A key factor that distinguishes project management from just 'management' is that it has this
final deliverable and a finite timespan, unlike management which is an ongoing process.
Because of this a project professional needs a wide range of skills; often technical skills, and
certainly people management skills and good business awareness

5. Describe briefly the features of CMMI model

SEI CMMI is a process improvement approach that provides organizations with the
essential elements of effective processes. CMMI can help you make decisions about
your process improvement plans.

The CMMI is structured as follows −

 Maturity Levels (staged representation) or Capability Levels (continuous representation)

 Process Areas
 Goals: Generic and Specific
 Common Features
 Practices: Generic and Specific
Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is a successor of CMM and is a more
evolved model that incorporates best components of individual disciplines of CMM like
Software CMM, Systems Engineering CMM, People CMM, etc. Since CMM is a reference
model of matured practices in a specific discipline, so it becomes difficult to integrate these
disciplines as per the requirements. This is why CMMI is used as it allows the integration of
multiple disciplines as and when needed.

Objectives of CMMI :

1. Fulfilling customer needs and expectations.

2. Value creation for investors/stockholders.
3. Market growth is increased.
4. Improved quality of products and services.
5. Enhanced reputation in Industry.
CMMI Representation – Staged and Continuous :

A representation allows an organization to pursue a different set of improvement objectives.

There are two representations for CMMI :

 Staged Representation :
 uses a pre-defined set of process areas to define improvement path.
 provides a sequence of improvements, where each part in the sequence serves as a
foundation for the next.
 an improved path is defined by maturity level.
 maturity level describes the maturity of processes in organization.
 Staged CMMI representation allows comparison between different organizations for
multiple maturity levels.
 Continuous Representation :
 allows selection of specific process areas.
 uses capability levels that measures improvement of an individual process area.
 Continuous CMMI representation allows comparison between different organizations on a
process-area-by-process-area basis.
 allows organizations to select processes which require more improvement.
 In this representation, order of improvement of various processes can be selected which
allows the organizations to meet their objectives and eliminate risks.
CMMI Model – Maturity Levels :
In CMMI with staged representation, there are five maturity levels described as follows :

1. Maturity level 1 : Initial

 processes are poorly managed or controlled.
 unpredictable outcomes of processes involved.
 ad hoc and chaotic approach used.
 No KPAs (Key Process Areas) defined.
 Lowest quality and highest risk.
2. Maturity level 2 : Managed
 requirements are managed.
 processes are planned and controlled.
 projects are managed and implemented according to their documented plans.
 This risk involved is lower than Initial level, but still exists.
 Quality is better than Initial level.
3. Maturity level 3 : Defined
 processes are well characterized and described using standards, proper procedures, and
methods, tools, etc.
 Medium quality and medium risk involved.
 Focus is process standardization.
4. Maturity level 4 : Quantitatively managed
 quantitative objectives for process performance and quality are set.
 quantitative objectives are based on customer requirements, organization needs, etc.
 process performance measures are analyzed quantitatively.
 higher quality of processes is achieved.
 lower risk
5. Maturity level 5 : Optimizing
 continuous improvement in processes and their performance.
 improvement has to be both incremental and innovative.
 highest quality of processes.
 lowest risk in processes and their performance.
CMMI Model – Capability Levels
A capability level includes relevant specific and generic practices for a specific process area
that can improve the organization’s processes associated with that process area. For CMMI
models with continuous representation, there are six capability levels as described below :

1. Capability level 0 : Incomplete

 incomplete process – partially or not performed.
 one or more specific goals of process area are not met.
 No generic goals are specified for this level.
 this capability level is same as maturity level 1.
2. Capability level 1 : Performed
 process performance may not be stable.
 objectives of quality, cost and schedule may not be met.
 a capability level 1 process is expected to perform all specific and generic practices for this
level.
 only a start-step for process improvement.
3. Capability level 2 : Managed
 process is planned, monitored and controlled.
 managing the process by ensuring that objectives are achieved.
 objectives are both model and other including cost, quality, schedule.
 actively managing processing with the help of metrics.
4. Capability level 3 : Defined
 a defined process is managed and meets the organization’s set of guidelines and standards.
 focus is process standardization.
5. Capability level 4 : Quantitatively Managed
 process is controlled using statistical and quantitative techniques.
 process performance and quality is understood in statistical terms and metrics.
 quantitative objectives for process quality and performance are established.
6. Capability level 5 : Optimizing
 focuses on continually improving process performance.
 performance is improved in both ways – incremental and innovation.
 emphasizes on studying the performance results across the organization to ensure that
common causes or issues are identified and fixed.

3. Justify PCMM

PCMM is a maturity structure that focuses on continuously improving the management and
development of the human assets of an organization.
It defines an evolutionary improvement path from Adhoc, inconsistently performed practices, to
a mature, disciplined, and continuously improving the development of the knowledge, skills, and
motivation of the workforce that enhances strategic business performance.

The People Capability Maturity Model (PCMM) is a framework that helps the organization
successfully address their critical people issues. Based on the best current study in fields such as
human resources, knowledge management, and organizational development, the PCMM guides
organizations in improving their steps for managing and developing their workforces.

The People CMM defines an evolutionary improvement path from Adhoc, inconsistently
performed workforce practices, to a mature infrastructure of practices for continuously elevating
workforce capability.

The PCMM subsists of five maturity levels that lay successive foundations for continuously
improving talent, developing effective methods, and successfully directing the people assets of
the organization. Each maturity level is a well-defined evolutionary plateau that institutionalizes
a level of capability for developing the talent within the organization

The five steps of the People CMM framework are:

Initial Level: Maturity Level 1

The Initial Level of maturity includes no process areas. Although workforce practices implement
in Maturity Level, 1 organization tend to be inconsistent or ritualistic, virtually all of these
organizations perform processes that are defined in the Maturity Level 2 process areas.

Managed Level: Maturity Level 2

To achieve the Managed Level, Maturity Level 2, managers starts to perform necessary people
management practices such as staffing, operating performance, and adjusting compensation as a
repeatable management discipline. The organization establishes a culture focused at the unit
level for ensuring that person can meet their work commitments. In achieving Maturity Level 2,
the organization develops the capability to handle skills and performance at the unit level. The
process areas at Maturity Level 2 are Staffing, Communication and Coordination, Work
Environment, Performance Management, Training and Development, and Compensation.

Defined Level: Maturity Level 3

The fundamental objective of the defined level is to help an organization gain a competitive
benefit from developing the different competencies that must be combined in its workforce to
accomplish its business activities. These workforce competencies represent critical pillars
supporting the strategic workforce competencies to current and future business objectives; the
improved workforce practices for implemented at Maturity Level 3 become crucial enablers of
business strategy.

Predictable Level: Maturity Level 4

At the Predictable Level, the organization handles and exploits the capability developed by its
framework of workforce competencies. The organization is now able to handle its capacity and
performance quantitatively. The organization can predict its capability for performing work
because it can quantify the ability of its workforce and of the competency-based methods they
use performing in their assignments.

Optimizing Level: Maturity Level 5

At the Optimizing Level, the integrated organization is focused on continual improvement. These
improvements are made to the efficiency of individuals and workgroups, to the act of
competency-based processes, and workforce practices and activities.