CMMI : Capability Maturity Model Integration
What CMMI is: A process improvement model that provides a set of industry-recognized practices to address productivity, performance, costs and stakeholder satisfaction in the systems engineering and software development process.
How CMMI is different: The CMMI provides an integrated, consistent, enduring framework for enterprise-wide process improvement and can accommodate new initiatives as future needs are identified. Unlike single-discipline or stove-pipe models that can result in confusion and higher costs when implemented together.
Who it is for: Those providing systems and software engineering products and services to organizations who transform customer needs expectations, and constraints into products, and supporting these products throughout their life. If you manufacture, code, analyze, maintain or document a product, you need this!
CMMI Maturity Levels:
A maturity level is a well-defined evolutionary plateau toward achieving a mature software process. Each maturity level provides a layer in the foundation for continuous process improvement.
In CMMI models with a staged representation, there are five maturity levels designated by the numbers 1 through 5 whereby 1 is the lowest level of maturity and 5 the highest. The five levels are actually: