Stretching Agile to fit CMMI Level 3 - the story of creating MSF for CMMI Process Improvement at Microsoft Corporation

Agile practitioners pride themselves on highly productive, responsive, low ceremony, lightweight, tacit knowledge processes with little waste, adaptive planning and frequent iterative delivery of value. It is often assumed that CMMI compliant processes need to be heavyweight, bureaucratic, slow moving, high ceremony and plan driven. Agile developers often skeptically perceive formal process improvement initiatives as management generated inefficiency that gets in the way of productivity. At Microsoft, we’ve adopted the teachings of W. Edwards Deming and stretched our MSF for Agile Software Development method to fit the requirements for CMMI Level 3. The resultant MSF for CMMI Process Improvement is a highly iterative, adaptive planning method, light on documentation, and heavily automated through tooling. It enables management and organization of software engineering through use of agile metrics such as velocity and cumulative flow but with an added dimension of an understanding of variation – adapted from Deming’s teachings. This is the story of how mixing Deming with Agile produced a lightweight CMMI solution for .Net developers everywhere.