The 1999 Survey of High Maturity Organizations

Over the last few years the Software Engineering Institute has investigated the high maturity practices of Maturity Level 4 and 5 software organizations via assessments, site visits, workshops, and surveys. This report summarizes the observations from the 1999 survey of high maturity organizations. Areas covered in the survey include management, engineering, tools and technology, quantitative analysis, and people issues. A specific area of interest is statistical process control, which is addressed in some detail in this report, but the observations cover a variety of engineering and management practices, including issues outside the scope of the Capability Maturity Model for Software.