Customer Reviews

CMMI® Survival Guide: Just Enough Process Improvement

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I've been exposed to a number of process improvement methodologies throughout my career, as well as read a number of books that try to explain them. To be honest, it's not a subject that's high on my "can't wait to read" list. But were more books styled like CMMI Survival Guide: Just Enough Process Improvement by Suzanne Garcia and Richard Turner, I would probably be more inclined to give them a chance. This book covers what you need to know without all of the mind-numbing jargon and detail...

Contents:
Part 1 - Scouting the Territory: Why We Think Process Is Important; Why Process Improvement Helps; Why Process Improvement Isn't Trivial
Part 2 - Mapping the Route: CMMI As Your Guide; A Decision-based Life Cycle for Improvement
Part 3 - Surviving the Passage: A PI Case Study; Survival and PI
Part 4 - Experiencing the Journey: Developing and Sustaining Sponsorship; Setting and Measuring Against Realistic Goals; Managing an Appraisal Life Cycle; Developing Process Improvement Infrastructure; Defining Processes; Looking Ahead
Part 5 - Outfitting Your Expedition (PI Resources): Tools and Techniques
Bibliography; Index

The basic direction of the authors is to talk to the reader like they were actually there, and to simplify CMMI so that it can be grasped and understood. And when you place a traditionally process-heavy methodology like CMMI up against agile methodologies like Extreme Programming, you realize just what a task the authors have taken on. Surprisingly, they pull it off pretty well. Part 1 lays the foundation for why a business or organization needs to have some sort of process improvement plan in place. The larger the organization is, the more important it becomes. Then using CMMI as the framework, part 2 covers the main topics of just what makes up the process improvement effort. Part 3 is where the application of the process becomes concrete. They use an easily-understandable case study that takes concepts and applies them to actual situations. That's usually where the large "formal" books fail. You can stuff as much information into your head as you want, but until it gets applied, it's pretty useless. Part 4 goes into more details of how the process works on an ongoing basis, followed by the actual tools and techniques that come into play for CMMI (part 5). By the end, you've covered everything you need to know (and you haven't poked your eyeballs out in frustration).

While this might not be the "official" guide to a methodology, it's far more readable and applicable than books three times its size. And if you can read and understand the material, you have a far better chance of making it actually work...

An easy to read book about using an abstract model: this is quite a feat. This is the book I'd write about improving processes, if I had the time, the talent, the motivation, etc. I've been doing this improvement work for many years, occasionally with the authors, and it is gratifying to see that they've captured so many good practices and useful ideas and shared them in an accessible, friendly way.
Many different fields use CMMI as a standard, to decide about improvement planning, to gauge their results, to convince customers they are reliable. This book shows the way around the pit-falls, points out the poison-ivy patches, and can help people find their way to the benefits of process improvement.
Of course CMMI for Development can be daunting: it describes professional engineering and engineering management practices in enough detail to be used in several ways by different communities. Finally, it isn't CMMI that drives people to disappointing improvement results. Mistakes in judging how easy it is to get people to change or even to describe their way of doing things often have led to "heavy" process implementations, as change agents add more and more detail hoping it will get people to use the processes. Or, mistaking how fast processes can be implemented can lead to mandated processes that work well for no one.
The authors have accurately described how to find your "main, broad road" to the benefits of improvements, and the many factors that you have to consider that will lead you there. Now I don't have to write this book. I'll give it to our customer's managers and their process engineers and be confident that they can get good direction from it: we now have a rich resource of techniques, stories, and directions that we can refer to in our projects.
Okay, some criticism: the techniques described in the last chapters are very effective, but have to be approached with discipline as well as a fun-finding mind-set, so they may not work for everyone. But that's one of the good things about the book- the authors say that few improvements work exactly the way you want, the very first time. Honest and useful advice.

Garcia and Turner address a widely held concern about adopting CMMI. That it is overly heavy, with much to assimilate before a group of programmers can usefully apply it. Well ok, CMMI can be used for more than just software development. But as a practical matter, most of its users and proposed users are in that business. The book is perhaps also a reaction to the Agile process. The latter is in some ways the mirror image of CMMI, with short design and coding cycles.

The book gives a relatively quick walkthrough of CMMI. A broad picture about using CMMI to improve your development process. En route, it also discusses general topics like project management issues, which are not exclusive to CMMI. The entire text is really just a primer for CMMI. It shows that CMMI has many subtopics, and the procedures involved can be rather detailed. Adding up to a formidable total barrier for the newcomer. But the text does supply enough information to give an appreciation of what CMMI can do for you, and the concepts to be mastered.

Of all the chapters, I found Chapter 11 to be the most formidable. It seems to give the strongest indicator of the amount of material in CMMI. Just consider the O process areas within CMMI. "You'll need people who can implement the practices in Organisational Process Focus, Organisational Process Definition, Organisational Training, Organisational Innovation and Deployment and (eventually) Organisational Process Performance". Whew! And the chapter goes on to give more information about what these might entail. No wonder some might baulk at CMMI.

I purchased this book to refresh my memory on basic CMMI concepts and the path towards appraisal for our small company. The book was well organized, very readable, and even humorous, which is laudable for such a dry topic. The authors did a great job of making the CMMI path real and provided enough information to grasp the totality and complexity of CMMI, which is necessary for "survival." They walked the reader through the process of forming process teams and gave a true-to-life scenario of how a typical project might play out.

All this was great, but I felt some sections could have been added. I would have liked to have seen a table that compared the appraisal criteria for different levels, and how organziations might go about addressing their specific pain points for process improvement. The book could have been longer, and could have offered an overview of some topics that weren't touched upon, such as: things to consider when estimating time frames for appraisal projects, or things to consider when choosing processes to improve.

The reason I rated this book 3 stars and not 4 stars was because I bought the Kindle edition; unfortunately, it has many table exhibits that shrink down to a microscopic level and are impossible to read, and Kindle is not capable of magnifying tables. I couldn't even read them with a magnifying glass, and I don't even wear reading glasses. I suggest those tables be re-formatted for e-books, because they contain key information --- that I sorely missed.

I found the book to high level to be of any practical use. I bought the book so that I could speak intelligently about CMMI when meeting with clients, not to be an expert. After reading, I feel I didn't gain any valuable information over reading summaries on the internet about what CMMI is.