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Reviewer: Donald Rajinder Chand

The Software Engineering Institute (SEI)'s approach to software process improvement based on the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) is recognized as a major contribution to the field of software engineering: it has furthered both the theoretical underpinnings and the practice of software development. Despite its validated and substantiated success in the aerospace industry and among Department of Defense subcontractors, the SEI approach has been slow in diffusing in the information systems (IS) arena. The view of the SEI approach in the IS community is that the underlying software development model is not applicable to the task of applications development in IS shops. By describing the CMM-based processes for executing software projects at Infosys, a highly successful systems development company that has been assessed at maturity level 4 in the SEI maturity framework, this book provides concrete evidence that CMM is relevant to IS. Jalote divides the software development processes at Infosys into three parts: project initiation, project planning, and project execution and termination. In the project initiation part, the book focuses on the business activity of proposals and contracts and on a key software development area, namely, requirements specification and management. In the project planning part, it discusses the basic planning activity of effort estimation and scheduling, and the process management areas of process definition and tailoring, process database and process capability baseline, and quality planning and defect estimation. Project planning also includes the key process areas (KPAs) of risk management, project management planning, and configuration management. The project execution and termination part addresses the software development areas of life cycle execution and the KPAs of peer review and project monitoring and control. It also includes the business activities of project audits and project closure. The focus of each chapter is on how a specific KPA or business activity is performed at Infosys. Each chapter begins with a brief overview of the KPA or business activity; describes the processes used at Infosys for that purpose; and ends with useful templates, examples, and sample documents. The Weekly Activity Report system project is used as a case study to illustrate the processes employed in a project. There is plenty of literature that describes and explains CMM and the SEI process, but there is a shortage of useful information about how to implement the KPAs in different software development settings in terms of what to measure and how to measure it. This book is a small step in overcoming this shortage. More significantly, it provides information that IS organizations can adapt to improve their systems development. I have been teaching a graduate elective on managing systems development in an IS curriculum for the past four years, and have used Watts Humphrey's Managing the software process [1] as a text. This semester I complemented my lectures with templates and samples provided in this book, and found that Humphrey's material became more meaningful and relevant to the IS professionals enrolled in my class. This book is a useful supplement to the typical primary text in software engineering, software process management, or project management courses.