Finding a Lead Appraiser

My company needs a very inexpensive Lead Appraiser – where can I find one?

I hate to say this, but you are using the wrong criteria for contracting a Lead Appraiser. When it comes to the CMMI and Lead Appraisers, you get what you pay for. And in point of fact, if you go with the lowest price Lead Appraiser that you can find, it is quite possible that this person is either very inexperienced as a Lead Appraiser or may not have the necessary experience or background to provide credible services. The risk you run is that the SEI may not accept the appraisal results in this situation. Then you have spent the money and may need to repeat everything, which can be a very expensive proposition.

Much better criteria to use when considering to hire a Lead Appraiser include:

• number of years experience as a Lead Appraiser
• number of appraisals led (SCAMPI A, B, and C)
• experience in working with small organizations
• ability to interpret the CMMI to appropriately fit your organization's needs
• recommendations/testamonials from clients who have worked with the Lead Appraiser

You should interview the Lead Appraiser. Prepare some questions and scenarios that apply to your organization and learn how they would interpret the CMMI in your context and what they would recommend.

The basic question comes down to why do you want to be appraised? Your internal costs for implementing the CMMI will far outweigh any external costs associated with an SEI-certified Lead Appraiser. You should be implementing the CMMI because there is some business value associated with the CMMI. Lead Appraisers are experts in process improvement. As an analogy, if you are going into the hospital for major surgery, do you go to the lowest price surgeon you can find (possibly someone with questionable credentials) or do you go to a surgeon that has a reputation for quality and success?

Think of it this way. Selecting a Lead Appraiser is a very important decision. There is certainly cost factors as well as risks to consider, and possibly other considerations as well. Therefore, I suggest that you look at the Decision Analysis and Resolution (DAR) Process Area and use the practices described there to select your CMMI services provider.

Advice on Process Performance Models

We have developed a Process Performance Model (PPM) for system testing defects. In our model we analyzed multiple factors (independent variables) that may influence the number of system test defects. However, the strange part is that the regression analysis has eliminated all of the variables except one, testing effort. Some of the other variables included things like number of test cases, tester's experience, and size (LOC).

Can a valid PPM only have one independent variable? The p-value is less than 0.05, and the R squared value is 0.8, so it seems that it would be reliable. But only one independent variable seems rather limited and weak to me, but I can't think of a justifiable reason why it is invalid considering we have analyzed data from several independent variables and only one was found to be statistically significant.

What do you think?

It does sound a bit odd. Perhaps you have overlooked some other X Factor that you should be evaluating. But it is conceivable to have a model with only one independent variable.

Basically your model looks like Y = mX +b. But given all of the PPMs that I have seen, they all contain multiple X factors.

Several things could be going on here.

1. The regression analysis was faulty

2. The list of X factors evaluated was incomplete

3. One or more of the X factors were a combination of factors that should have been separately evaluated

4. Not enough data were evaluated for the regression analysis to yield proper answers

5. The distribution of the data is not a normal distribution (Gaussian distribution aka Bell Shaped Curve) and analytic techniques for a normal distribution were mistakenly used

You probably should have a statistical expert independently examine your analysis to see if the resulting PPM is in fact a linear relationship between X and Y.

The other option is to use the PPM for several months of analysis and see how accurate it is. If the PPM yields accurate predictions, then it is most likely a good PPM.

One thing that can happen if you have not been careful with storing the raw data and/or not collecting at the proper level of detail is that factors can be inadvertently combined and thus cancel each other out thereby yielding a factor that on the surface looks reasonable, but may in fact not be. For example if one element is high and the other one it is combined with low, then the result will be somewhere in between. Think of two out of phase sine waves. Each one by itself looks like a sine wave, but the combination is something else entirely.

So as an example, suppose you are collecting defect data (requirements defects, input defects, design defects, coding defects, test case defects, etc.) and you have neglected to use these categories to count and distinguish the different types of defects. Then the defect count probably won’t correlate with anything because the individual categories are cancelling each other out. This is the kind of data behavior that caused many of the early HM adopters to throw away their historical data and start over from scratch. So it is very important to follow the Measurement and Analysis PA to properly define all of the base measures and to properly store them so when it comes time to perform the statistical analysis of the data, there is sufficient information stored to allow different types of analyses to be performed to isolate the specific information of interest.

Hope this explanation helps.