The Capability Maturity Model: A Summary

Continuous process improvement is based on many small, evolutionary steps rather than revolutionary innovations. The Capability Maturity Model® (CMM®) provides a framework for organizing these evolutionary steps into five maturity levels that lay successive foundations for continuous process improvement. These five maturity levels define an ordinal scale for measuring the maturity of an organization’s software process and for evaluating its software process capability. They also help an organization prioritize its improvement efforts.