Achieving CMMI Level 2 with Enhanced Extreme Programming Approach
This addresses the compatibility debate between agile methods and CMMI for software engineering organizations, providing incremental empirical insights.
The paper investigated whether Extreme Programming (XP) can achieve CMMI Level 2 maturity, finding empirical evidence that it is possible but requires enhancements beyond standard XP definitions. The study demonstrates that CMMI can be used to assess and improve agile processes, though it involves more interpretation in agile contexts.
The relationship between agile methods and Software Engineering Institute's CMM approach is often debated. Some authors argue that the approaches are compatible, while others have criticized the application of agile methods from the CMM perspective. Only few CMM based assessments have been performed on projects using agile approaches. This paper explores an empirical case where a project using Extreme Programming (XP) based approach was assessed using the CMMI framework. The results provide empirical evidence pointing out that it is possible to achieve maturity level 2 with approach based on XP. Yet, the results confirm that XP, as it is defined, is not sufficient. This study demonstrates that it is possible to use the CMMI for assessing and improving agile processes. However, the analysis reveals that assessing an agile organization requires more interpretations than normally would be the case. It is further concluded that the CMMI model does not always support interpretations in an agile context.