How ISO 9001 Compares With The CMM

MARK C. PAULK Software Engineering Institute he Capability Maturity Model T Model for Software, developed by the Software Engineering Institute, and the ISO 9000 series of standards, developed by the International Organization for Standardization, have the common concern of quality and process management. The two are driven by similar issues and are intuitively correlated, but they differ in their underlying philosophies: ISO 9001, the standard in the 9000 series that pertains to software development and maintenance, identifies the minimal requirements for a quality system, while the CMM underlines the need for continuous process improvement. This statement is somewhat subjective, of course; some members of the international standards community maintain that if you read ISO 9001 with insight, it does address continuous process improvement. Corrective action, for example, can be construed as continuous improvement. Nonetheless, the CMM tends to address the issue of continuous process improvement more explicitly than ISO 9001. This article examines how the two documents relate. I have essentially mapped clauses of ISO 9001 to CMM key practices. The mapping is based on an analysis of ISO 9001, ISO 9000-3, TickIt (a British guide to using ISO 9000-3 and 9001), and the TickIt training materials.1 ISO 9000-3 elaborates significantly on ISO 9001, while the TickIt training materials help in interpreting both ISO 9000-3 and ISO 9001. HOW ISO 9001 COMPARES WITH THE CMM