Blending Six Sigma and CMMI - an approach to accelerate process improvement in SMEs

Significant software process improvement (SPI) of any kind requires a substantial investment of effort, time and money on part of organizations that try to follow it. SPI based on capability maturity model integration (CMMI) is no exception and adopting it is even more challenging for many small and medium enterprises (SMEs). However, it is becoming increasingly important for SMEs to get involved in SPI initiatives to gain imperative competitive advantage and survive in the software industry. In this paper, we explain how SMEs can adopt CMMI by first tailoring it to suit their requirements and then blending the cut-down version with Six Sigma's define, measure, analyze, improve, and control (DMAIC) methodology to reduce the time required to attain CMMI maturity level 2 and 3. Moreover, we recommend standard templates and Six Sigma tools to maintain and control CMMI artifacts for different process areas (PAs). We show the effectiveness of our model by applying it on two PAs. Our proposed model is intended to accelerate CMMI adoption by SMEs and to help them compete better in the international market.