The Long Road to Software Process Improvement: A Chronology of One Company's Efforts

In late November 1996, AA Company (AAC) formed a 'methodology team' that began looking at ways to improve the company's development environment. Currently (circa February 2000), AAC is following a plan for improvement based on the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). AAC's initial effort to use CMM as a software process improvement (SPI) framework was somewhat flawed and, as a result, AAC has invested more than three years on the process; they still have a long way to go. This paper chronicles the route taken by AAC in their quest to improve software development and highlights some of the triumphs and traps along the way.