CMMI Practices for Documentation Teams

Our organization is CMMI Maturity Level 3 Ver 1.2 certified. Our delivery teams are going to implement CMMI practices soon. I did see the processes of the organization and though all the roles appeared from project leader to developer to manager, except for documentation teams. In the same context, I am very curious to see if there are any set of practices to be followed for the documentation department in CMMI as all the processes at CMMI ML2, ML3 are specific to project management, engineering, support, organization areas.

Your question actually raises some other questions:

1. What are the roles and responsibilities of your documentation teams and documentation department?
2. If this group of people is responsible for the technical documentation (e.g. requirements, design, etc.) and the user documentation, how and why were they excluded from your ML 3 SCAMPI A?
3. How are the delivery teams different from the organization that achieved Maturity Level 3?

What is puzzling with your question is that REQM, RD, TS, PI, and CM cover the different aspects of writing and controlling the various documents associated with designing, developing, maintaining, operating, using, and deploying products. And then VER covers the inspection/review of the documents before placing them in the baseline and controlling them with CM.

It does appear from your description that your organization omitted the documentation people as a process role from your process documentation. In my opinion, at a minimum, your PPQA audits should have identified this omission long before your SCAMPI A appraisal. Then your Lead Appraiser should have identified this gap during the appraisal planning process before the SCAMPI A and should have taken steps to address the gap or postponed your appraisal until the documentation group was included in the scope. Since your documentation group was apparently not included in the scope of your appraisal, this oversight also calls into question your Lead Appraiser’s credentials and quite possibly the validity of your SCAMPI A results.

The bottom line, in my opinion, and based on only what you stated, your documentation group should have been included in the scope of your ML 3 SCAMPI A. Even if all they do is Document Configuration Control (which would be covered under CM) or Document Quality Assurance (which would be covered under PPQA).

The answers to my above questions could provide additional information that would change my opinion.

Work Environment Evidence Question

There are two Specific Practices in the CMMI that address the work environment:

• OPD SP 1.6 Establish and maintain work environment standards
• IPM SP 1.3 Establish and maintain the project’s work environment based on the organization’s work environment standards

There are other Specific Practices in the model that address specific environments:

• VER SP 1.2 Establish and maintain the environment needed to support verification
• VAL SP 1.2 Establish and maintain the environment needed to support validation
• PI SP 1.2 Establish and maintain the environment needed to support the integration of the product components

In addition, the model references a number of other project work environments: maintenance, operational, production, and engineering.

Since IPM SP 1.3 contains the phrase “establish and maintain”, the organization needs to provide for a SCAMPI A appraisal evidence of “formulate”, “document”, and “use” of the project’s work environment. What is appropriate evidence to provide for IPM SP 1.3?

The “document” evidence could be the document(s) containing the description of each of the project’s work environments and its relationship to the organization’s work environment standards. The “formulate” evidence might be the inspection/review report(s) of these document(s). And the “use” evidence could be an example of a work product produced using the documented work environment. For example, evidence of use of the development environment might be a product build report demonstrating use of the environment for developing the product.

Since the Verification, Validation, and Integration Environments are covered by other Process Areas, it would be appropriate to provide for IPM SP 1.3 evidence of use of other components of the documented work environment to demonstrate the work environment covers more than testing.

Does "interface" in CMMI include user interface ?

In interpreting RD SP2.3 "Identify interface requirements", someone told me that the interfaces can also include man-machine interface, or so-called user interface. But the model says "Interface between functions (or between objects) are identified", at first, I thought that the definition of "interface" in CMMI does not include user interface. But however, in some software development methodologies (e.g. object-oriented), the users are also considered as objects, so, maybe user-interface is also a kind of interface? The same question is also in TS SP2.3 "Design interfaces using criteria", PI SP 2.1 "Review interface descriptions for completeness", and PI SP2.2 "Manage interface."

The interface requirements referred to in Requirements Development (RD) Specific Practice (SP) 2.3, Technical Solution (TS) SP 2.3, and Product Integration (PI) SP2.1 and 2.2 cover ALL interfaces. Keep in mind that you have to do whatever is right for your organization and your projects. If the user interface is important to your project and product, then it should be included in the interfaces covered by the referenced SPs.