An Agile approach to CMMI-DEV levels 4 and 5 in Web development

Abstract

CMMI (Capability Maturity Model-Integration) model proposes a set of process areas, including suggested practices, with the aim of helping organizations to improve the quality of their products and processes. It is commonly accepted that as an organization progresses through the different levels of CMMI, the quality of its development might improve as well as the overhead of the development process, impeding it to quickly adapt to customers or partners changing needs. Besides, Agile practices allow quick adaptation and early delivery of business value. The specificity of Web environments makes them suitable for Agile approaches. However, as quality requirements for Web systems increase, a combination of Agile practices allowing organizations to achieve higher levels of CMMI-DEV with a limited process overhead can be very interesting to organizations that aim to keep adaptability. This way, they might strengthen their development processes in order to produce high quality results. This paper presents a gap analysis between the most used Agile practices (Scrum and XP) as well as a mapping proposal, including ad-hoc modifications and other Agile practices, to achieve all CMMI-DEV level 4 and 5 specific goals. To conclude, it drafts relevant conclusions and proposes future lines of research