Background: The captioned workshop was organized by Eximius Centre of Export-Import Bank of India, on January 10, 2003 with faculty support from KPMG, Bangalore. The objective of the workshop was to help the participants gain knowledge as well as application oriented knowledge for applying CMM and allied standards successfully in their respective organizations and to know the resources that are needed for this and the practical aspects allied with such applications.

Faculty: The Workshop was addressed by Mr. K. K. Raman, Associate Director and Mr. Sankararaman, Manager, KPMG, Bangalore.

Target Sectors: IT and IT related services.

Summary of Proceedings: The Workshop started with a presentation on 'The Role and Services of Exim Bank' made by the Centre. The Course objectives were to understand terms such as process, capability and maturity and discuss the 18 key process areas in the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). The presentation continued with describing the fundamental concepts of the CMM and explaining the use and structure of the CMM. The focus areas included CMM for Software, systems engineering, trusted software or tailored CMM, software acquisition, integrated product development and maturity model integration. CMM is applied to appraisals, including assessments and evaluations and process improvement efforts. The quality of a software system is highly influenced by the quality of the process used to develop and maintain it. A mature process is one, which is consistent with the way work actually gets done i.e. defined, documented and continuously improved, understood and used and finally supported visibly by management and others. A mature process is audited and with constructive use of product and process measurement is disciplined by the use of technology. The organization builds an infrastructure that contains effective, usable and consistently applied processes. The organizational culture must convey the process; management must nurture the culture, which is conveyed with role models and rewards. Institutionalized processes endure after people who originally defined them have gone.

The benefits of model based improvement are that it establishes a common language, forges a shared vision, builds a set of processes and practices developed with input from a broad selection of the software community and provides a framework for prioritizing actions and for performing reliable and consistent appraisals. The risks of model based improvements are that that they are simplifications of real world, they are not comprehensive, interpretation and training must be aligned to business objectives and judgement is necessary to use models correctly and with insight. What is CMM? It is a commonsense application of process management and quality improvement concepts to software development and maintenance. It is a community-developed guide, a model for organizational improvement and is the underlying structure for reliable and consistent CMM-based appraisal methods. The final intent is to identify and eliminate chronic causes of poor performance and continuously improve the software process. The presentations also covered a road map to CMM with a definition of the five levels of software process maturity based on an organization's support for certain key process areas (KPAs) with a definition of Level 1 (initial), Level 2 (repeatable), Level 3 (defined), Level 4 (managed) and Level 5 (optimizing). Any software process which goes through these levels will reduce the set of defects, cycle time, will become cost effective and will increase the overall productivity of the organization. The faculty also spoke about the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and concluded with an overview to CMMI. CMMI supports each approach with a representation i.e. for a process capability approach (a continuous representation) and for an organizational maturity approach (a staged representation).