IS Employee Attitudes and Perceptions at Varying Levels of Software Process Maturity

In the mid-1980s, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Research and Engineering (MITRE) Corporation began development of a process maturity framework to help organizations improve their software development and maintenance processes. Over the next several years, the framework evolved from a description of software process maturity (Humphrey and Sweet 1987) to the first version of the Software Capability Maturity Model (Paulk, Curtis, and Chrissis 1991) and version 1.1 (Paulk, Curtis et al. 1993). In 2002, the Capability Maturity Model – Integrated (CMMI) v1.1 was introduced to consolidate the Software Capability Maturity Model (SWCMM), the Systems Engineering Capability Model, and the Integrated Product Development Capability Maturity Model (SEI CMMI Product Team 2002). Version 1.2 of the CMMI was released in August, 2006. Data for the present research was collected during 2003 and 2004, when few companies had made decisions to move from the SW-CMM to the CMMI. Thus, the participating companies included in this research were those that had achieved levels associated with the SW-CMM, also referred to simply as the CMM.