Process Tailoring and the the Software Capability Maturity Model

The Software Capability Maturity Model (SW-CMM) is serving as the foundation for a major portion of the process improvement being undertaken in the software industry. It is composed of two volumes: the Capability Maturity Model for Software and the Key Practices of the Capability Maturity Model. The key practices of the SW-CMM are expressed in terms that reflect normal practices of organizations that work on large, government contracts. There is, however, a significant population of software-producing and acquiring organizations, operating in different environments, for which the key practices require significant interpretation and/or tailoring, prior to application. This report presents a tailoring framework that identifies process artifacts, tailoring processes, and their relationships to project artifacts, and explores the nature of various kinds of tailoring used in the definition and development of software process descriptions. Techniques appropriate to each type of tailoring are then discussed. The general approach utilizes and builds upon the Software Process Framework, whose purpose is to provide guidance for designing, analyzing, and reviewing software processes for consistency with the SW-CMM.