More Good Agile CMMI news...

Check out this news from Brad Swanson's blog.

As you read, please keep the following in mind:

The company was already very mature at using agile methods. It's likely that their maturity in their own processes enabled their capability to affect process improvement (which, afterall, is what CMMI is really about). So, it's not that agile ALONE facilitated their CMMI ML4 rating, it's that they were good at what they did, had a culture of discipline to keep at it and that alone probably got them all the way through ML3. What ML4 provided was the ability to manage their projects and their processes statistically. Now *that* takes some doing!

Brad is right that many companies achieve high maturity levels (i.e., 4 & 5) using smoke and mirrors. And, the SEI is attempting to crack down on that (personally, I'm not sure their approach will entirely work).

Although... to get ML4 in two years is very very unusual. Readers should be warned that the SEI *is* likely to investigate that appraisal.

On the other hand, if it can be shown that mature agile methods allowed the company to get to ML4 in two years, you can bet it will open a flood of interest in agile from the "traditionalists".

Way to go!

What a difference a YEAR makes!

Reporting here from Denver as I particpate in the NDIA CMMI conference (see this entry), I am happy to report that traction for agile and CMMI is really growing.

The Agile/Lean track sessions are full, attracting 40-80 people each (while there are at least 8 concurrent tracks). The presentations are unique and most of them are pointing out all the different ways in which to apply CMMI in agile settings and most of those are pointing out how it's poor CMMI implementations and bad processes that prevent agile from surviving in places where CMMI is being implemented. In fact, one presentation pointed out how being ('doing') agile actually takes more discipline than 'traditional' BPUF development because what BPUF does is actually abdicate to a contextually obsolete document the responsibility for staying on top of customer needs and priorities.

One fascinating (but not surprising) presentation was of a large systems integrator (i.e., "Defense Contractor") with a large Maturity Level 5 organization that is using agile approaches and maintains its Maturity Level practices. As you might imagine, there was hardly A THING about how they do it that isn't highly proprietary, so whatever the presenter said is about as much as I know about it. Still... I plan to become a really good friend to this person! :-)

Way cool!

Quick 10-20

Just a note to let everyone know that I'm in Denver, CO, attending NDIA's 6th Annual CMMI Technology Conference and User Group event this week.

Monday I gave a CMMI Crash Course tutorial, and Wednesday I'm lecturing on My Agile Life with CMMI. I'll be linking to both sets of content shortly.

I'll be here through lunchtime on Thursday.
If you're in the Denver area, gimme a holler.

This just in...

A colleague pointed out that our rather hip CMMI FAQ was missing a rather basic FAQ:
"What is CMMI?"

Now the hippest (and best) CMMI FAQ on the web, has the best (though not as funny as we would have liked it to be) answer to that question here.

P.S. This week I'm teaching Introduction to CMMI (v1.2) in Atlanta, GA. Today was day 1. It seems to be going rather well. I like teaching to sharp folks. :-)