Over the past few years, agile development has evolved from a niche concept — a niche market that is small and underserved — to an enterprise’s strengths. The product drives this market and there is a profitable basis for it. Became a standard practice adopted by many large companies around the world. Accelerating software development through small, self-managed teams is now an established strategy and is increasingly seen as key to enterprise innovation and competitiveness. The CMMI Institute’s statistical report shows that more than 80% of the enterprises that participated in the 2018 CMMI assessment used Agile. Today, as companies seek to inject more agility into their entire organizations and their culture, agile techniques are not just applied to software development. Despite the growing popularity of Agile, enterprises still encounter problems when trying to promote the use of Agile software development across the enterprise. While Agile can be very effective for small, independent, self-managed projects, it is difficult to coordinate the multiple projects and teams needed to build large, complex products and systems. The result is that the company has encountered many of the same thorny issues as earlier software development approaches, such as integration and interface issues, insufficient meeting of all requirements, late delivery, and quality deficiencies.
As a result, as Agile grows in popularity, so does the need for best practices to overcome these problems. CMMI V2.0 provides these best practices to help organizations establish mature processes to manage the complexities and risks that scale agility may face.
How does CMMI V2.0 help achieve Agile at scale
CMMI is a set of best practices for improving business performance. Over the years, many companies have used both CMMI and agile development. A 2017 survey found that 80% of companies using CMMI also use Agile. But the latest version of CMMI V2.0 enhances the synergy between the two, providing direct guidance for building scale and resilience in agile development.
CMMI V2.0 specifically addresses the challenges that enterprises face when trying to scale Agile, such as accurately estimating development time metrics and resources, integrating system components, and maintaining quality. CMMI V2.0 also supports a variety of other processes that are critical to successful implementation, such as managing and delivering services and selecting and managing vendor processes. In addition, CMMI V2.0 is extended to cover more areas, including security. CMMI V2.0 focuses not only on improving performance, but also on maintaining habits and persistence to ensure that the enterprise maintains that performance over time. CMMI V2.0 provides these key advantages while minimizing input, because CMMI V2.0 allows you to select practice domains that meet the unique needs of your business.
The full use of CMMI is the key to successful Agile development at scale, in sharp contrast to other approaches that attempt to support Agile at scale. Often, these approaches address some challenges but fail to address others at all. An example is SAFE (Scale Agile Framework), which is missing key elements in key areas such as software quality, design and integration, managing services and suppliers, planning and managing work, managing business resilience, and maintaining performance.
Solving integration issues
Take a look at how CMMI can help organizations successfully apply agile development at scale. Two areas where organizations often run into trouble are project estimation and product integration. CMMI provides reliable estimation methods that support agile approaches to building large and complex systems from many small pieces. It also helps ensure that each system component designed can be integrated with other components.
In most organizations, multiple teams develop the components of the system in a Sprint. Large systems may involve many individual sprints, each of which generates components that must be integrated. Agile projects often fail to adequately address this problem during the design and requirements phase, and as a result, many software development organizations encounter significant issues related to integration between interfaces and components. If you have two development teams doing agile sprints, producing different components, how do you know if these components will be integrated once the sprints are complete? If you have not predefined how the components are assembled, then each component will be built independently in a vacuum.
CMMI provides a powerful framework to help companies define interface and integration requirements at the initial requirements and design stage, and then track and test them at various sprints throughout the development process. Without CMMI, the ability to ensure fault-free integration is entirely dependent on the team’s experience. An expert developer may have the foresight and expertise to ensure that components integrate. But less experienced people may lack critical knowledge, even if they can write good code quickly. CMMI best practices radically improve the team’s expertise, enabling the team to uncover potential problems that might otherwise have been missed.
By supporting important but routine project tasks such as estimation and integration, CMMI solves the difficult and interesting challenges of developing new features by allowing developers to focus on what they really need to do. Also, because CMMI provides a common framework for all development projects, it makes it easier to move people from project to project, increasing organizational agility. As one project ends, CMMI makes it easier for these developers to move on to another project and start working.
Use CMMI to avoid agile clutter
Attempts to scale agile development can easily lead to chaos without a mature process for coordinating multiple teams and individuals to sprint. CMMI provides a comprehensive and unique business performance framework that can be used throughout the organization, so companies can better coordinate projects, integrate complex systems, and deliver higher-quality software faster.
How to Truly Scale Agile Development in the Enterprise — with CMMI, Submitted by: CMMI Institute, October 15, 2019, https://cmmiinstitute.com/res…