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.

PPQA or VER?

I have a question. When people performa a review to assure than a coding standard is being used, is it considered a PPQA audit or a verification activity (VER)?

The correct answer is, it depends upon the nature of the review. If your documented software development process states that the coding standard is used to write code. Then a process audit of the software development process would be looking at the coding standard and determining if it was indeed being used by the developers. That would be a Process and Product Quality Assurance (PPQA) audit activity. If your documented verification process stated that a code peer review involves comparing the code to the coding standard, then that would be a Verification (VER) activity. And if your documented processes specified both of these conditions, then the answer to your question is both a PPQA audit activity and a VER activity. How you view the code review against the coding standard is therefore context dependant.

If you are asking this question because you are preparing your Direct and Indirect Evidence for your PIIDs and a SCAMPI A appraisal, then you will need to explain the context so the appraisal team will be able to correctly evaluate the evidence.

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.

Establishing the Verification Environment

VER SP 1.2 is “Establish and maintain the environment to support verification.” Companion practices are OPD SP 1.6 “Establish and maintain work environment standards.” And IPM SP 1.3 “Establish and maintain the project’s work environment based on the organization’s work environment standards.”

So what this all means is that you have to define at the organization level what the standards are for verification environments, in IPM define the project’s verification environment(s) in the project plan, and in VER define what the various verification environments are. When you consider VER, there are at least two and possibly more verification environments depending on the system you are developing. At a minimum you have a peer review environment and a product testing environment. Both of these environments have requirements, resources, equipment, and tools which you will have to define yourself. In the case of peer reviews and inspections the environment is many times just the conference room with a whiteboard, LAN connection, computer, and a projector, plus other requirements. The testing environment may be a specific room and equipment set aside as a testing lab, etc. So, to implement VER SP 1.2 you have to define the requirements for each verification environment that you have defined for the project, along with the resources, equipment, and tools, and then the acquisition of these items to actually construct and maintain the environment(s), which also include upgrades over time.

And keep in mind the CMMI definition of the phrase “establish and maintain”, which means formulate, document, and use. Therefore you need to design the environment, document the environment, and use the environment for verification.