A Preliminary Study of Using the SEI's Capability Maturity Model to Set Statistical Control Bounds on DOD Contractor Cost and Schedule Performance

Current methods for monitoring the performance of Department of Defense (DOD) software development contractors have not been successful in reversing the current trend of over budget and behind schedule software development. The DOD has adopted the Software Engineering Institute's (SEI's) Capability Maturity Model (CMM) as a method of determining the process maturity of a software developer with the idea that a more mature process will lead to improved cost and schedule performance. The goal of this research was to determine if a model based on the CMM rating level of a contractor could be developed and used in conjunction with statistical process control to determine if contractor performance was progressing in a satisfactory manner. To investigate this possibility descriptive statistics were applied to historical contractor performance data and a model was established. A different set of historical data was then used to evaluate the performance of the new model. This performance was then compared to the performance of current methods of statistical control. The results obtained in this research suggest that using the CMM rating level of a contractor to set statistical control bounds is as good, and perhaps better than, the current method being employed.

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