Capability Maturity Model

From ISO 9000 essentials:

The ISO 9000 family of standards represents an international consensus on good quality management practices. It consists of standards and guidelines relating to quality management systems and related supporting standards.

ISO 9001:2008 is the standard that provides a set of standardized requirements for a quality management system, regardless of what the user organization does, its size, or whether it is in the private, or public sector. It is the only standard in the family against which organizations can be certified – although certification is not a compulsory requirement of the standard.

The other standards in the family cover specific aspects such as fundamentals and vocabulary, performance improvements, documentation, training, and financial and economic aspects.

From Wikipedia: ISO 9000:

ISO 9000 is a family of standards for quality management systems. ISO 9000 is maintained by ISO, the International Organization for Standardization and is administered by accreditation and certification bodies. The rules are updated, as the requirements motivate changes over time.

Some of the requirements in ISO 9001:2008 (which is one of the standards in the ISO 9000 family) include

* a set of procedures that cover all key processes in the business;
* monitoring processes to ensure they are effective;
* keeping adequate records;
* checking output for defects, with appropriate and corrective action where necessary;
* regularly reviewing individual processes and the quality system itself for effectiveness; and
* facilitating continual improvement

A company or organization that has been independently audited and certified to be in conformance with ISO 9001 may publicly state that it is "ISO 9001 certified" or "ISO 9001 registered". Certification to an ISO 9001 standard does not guarantee any quality of end products and services; rather, it certifies that formalized business processes are being applied.

Although the standards originated in manufacturing, they are now employed across several types of organizations. A "product", in ISO vocabulary, can mean a physical object, services, or software.

CMMI project is a collaborative effort sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense Office of the Secretary of Defense/Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics (OSD/AT&L) and the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), with participation by government, industry, and the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). The project's objective is to develop a product suite that provides industry and government with a set of integrated products to support process and product improvement. The intent is to preserve government and industry investment in process improvement and enhance the use of multiple models. The project's outputs will be integrated model(s), assessment method(s), and training materials. DoD's concerns were to stop proliferation of CMMs and to standardize on one model. Work continues at a frantic pace on this project. However, since industry has a lot of effort and money invested in the SW-CMM (and to a lesser extent, the SE-CMM), implementation may not proceed as quickly as some anticipate.