Wednesday, March 16, 2005

MSF for CMMI

So the cat is out of the bag, with respect to the work I’m doing for Microsoft. Last week at the SEI’s SEPG convention, we announced MSF for CMMI(R) Process Improvement - an MSF process instance which is enacted in Visual Studio Team System. We got a very positive reaction to the concept from convention attendees. We got some positive reaction from the press too - see this Yahoo article.

It’s been a learning experience for me. When you set an agile guy loose on a formal traditional software engineering problem such as CMMI conformance something unusual is bound to happen. For me, it was the discovery that the CMM was inspired by the work of Edwards Deming and the realization that levels 2 through 4 are all about special cause variation with level 5 being about continuous improvement (or reduction of common cause variation). Coupled to the transparent traceability of work items and work products, this opened the door to the agile management solution for CMMI. MSF for CMMI(R) Process Improvement will be a lightweight process. We’ve taken a stretch-to-fit approach by stretching our MSF for Agile Software Development process and adding just enough to meet a CMMI Level 3 appraisal. We’re targeting Level 3 this year and will go for a Level 5 solution later.

We’re going to be using a lot of agile management techniques including velocity, cumulative flow and uncertainty buffering with unplanned work charts. Anyone familiar with the material at this site will know that I’ve done a lot of the groundwork on a Deming style solution for software engineering. To further break with tradition, we won’t be offering time on task estimating and tracking, earned value and critical path or much of any other traditional PM guidance as standard elements. We do recognize that there are many people in the market who need these things - particularly through government mandate. So we’ll be providing guidance on how to swap them in and users who want EV, CPM and time tracking can still do it with the MS Project interface to Team System. However, out of the box, it’ll be a lightweight, agile approach to CMMI.

Because this is quite radically different and threatens to actually deliver a truly democratized CMMI process for the rest of us, we’ve had to pull in some heavyweight advisors and collect data points from other respected members of the community, to ensure that we’re not crazy and that we can meet the spirit and the letter of the CMMI law (err, goals). This is one of the cool aspects of working for Microsoft which wouldn’t be possible for me as an independent consultant. I get to work with people like Mike Konrad who looks after the CMMI model for the SEI and Jack Ferguson who guides the appraisal side. I’ve taken other data points from Bill Curtis who owned the SW_CMM for a long time and now through the recent acquisition of Teraquest, is Chief Process Officer at Borland, and Watts Humphrey who started the whole thing off 17 years ago with a dream of delivering a Deming solution for software engineering. Overall I’ve had a very positive reaction from these experts. It’s validation that it may be possible to deliver an agile, lightweight, low overhead, low bureaucracy CMMI solution. [Naturally, there are lots of others providing input and guidance on this project and they all know who they are.]

So now I need to deliver on the promise. Time will tell whether I get it right. I’ll be saying more about this publicly around TechEd in July.