Business-oriented software process improvement based on CMM using QFD

The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) from the Software Engineering Institute has been used successfully by many organizations for Software Process Improvement (SPI). Despite its great success, there exists a disconnect between business goals and maturity levels. A new framework using Quality Function Deployment (QFD) has been developed to deal with this problem. This framework serves three purposes: (i) it establishes a connection between requirements from the business and Key Process Areas (KPAs) in CMM; (ii) it proposes a methodology for the priority assessment of requirements from multiple perspectives; and (iii) it helps identify a set of software process improvement actions based on business requirements and KPAs. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.