Agile Methodology in Cmm Framework: an Approach to Success for Software Companies in China

CMM has been well accepted by the world as the standard for software development process control, quality improvement, and software company capacity evaluation. Aiming at the software outsourcing service market, more and more Chinese software companies are involved in the CMM certifications rush. However, to most of them, CMM is a very challenging goal. As China’s software industry is still at a primitive stage, it becomes critical to seek a suitable way to promote the competence of the smalland mid-sized Chinese software companies in worldwide competition. This research-in-progress paper suggests that Chinese software companies adopt agile development methodologies (ADM) while following the CMM standard. Using eXtreme Programming (XP) as the example, the paper shows that the ADM methodology can well fit the CMM framework. A further research plan is proposed for the case study in order to obtain the evidence to support the arguments in the paper.