MSF for CMMI Process Improvement and Agile can Coexist
Some people are of the mindset that conforming to all but the lowest level of CMMI is only possible at the expense of agility. Glen Alleman, on his Herding Cats blog, has a post [CMMI and Agile] that digs into David Anderson’s post about how the Declaration of Interdependence and CMMI are orthogonal to each other. Each (CMMI & Agile) leaves room for the other to exist.
Also, see David Anderson’s conference paper (PDF and PPT links in his post – Stretching Agile to Fit CMMI Level 3) that he presented at Agile 2005 last week that dives into this topic.
And if you’re curious to see how MSF for CMMI Process Improvement stacks up against MSF for Agile Software Development, I’ll remind you that Dave McKinstry has a side-by-side evaluation in this post [How do the MSF 4.0 siblings compare today?].
Joel Semeniuk has a great post today on why he likes CMMI. His post will also help you see that Agile and CMMI are not at odds.
I’ve always believed that CMMI does nothing to hinder the agile development team. CMMI is not specific and is enhanced with good management tools (Microsoft Visual Studio Team System stands out here). CMMI may not be for everyone, but for me it provides a “design pattern”, if you will, of process improvement that can be taken and interpreted for different organizations, depending on their specific needs.
Update: Joel had another post [Documentation <> Process] following that one that's a great read, too.
