Lean CMMI: An Iterative and Incremental Approach to CMMI-Based Process Improvement

Software Process Improvement (SPI) projects incorporate organization transition risks which may cause many process improvement initiatives to fail. To mitigate these risks, an iterative and incremental approach called 'Process Increments' is used to manage the SPI project. In this paper, the Configuration Management process area is used as a case study to show the improvement results difference when the 'Process Increments' approach is used. Results are compared with similar projects which didn't use an incremental approach. This approach shifts the focus from adopting new techniques to achieving value-add for the organization and shows excellent results in effective and efficient implementation of Software Configuration Management. Through our proposed process increment model, we could reach a significant increase in the performance of the software process improvement.