For years computer scientists have been investigating thousands of software projects to answer the question: 'why are some projects completed successfully and not others?' Scientists found that the key difference is the processes and practices used by development teams. Successful teams have some 'good' practices and business processes they strongly follow during the project.

Based on these findings, researchers have created models of good business processes and practices that should be used by development teams to maximize probability of the project's success.

This fully corresponds with the modern theory of Quality Management which states that the quality of the product greatly depends on the quality of processes used for development of this product.

There are several world-famous maturity models of software development processes intended for assessing the ability of a software development company to perform software projects. The most well-known of these is the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) developed by Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. CMM was initially created in 1989 for United States Air Force to use as an objective evaluation tool of software subcontractors.

CMM has 5 levels (5th is the highest) to describe software development companies' capabilities.

CMM is recognized and widely used by Motorola internally and also for software contractor evaluation purposes. Since Motorola was our largest customer, Rhonda had to be certified for CMM. Preparation began in the late 1990's. It was an enormous task for all Rhonda staff - a lot of processes were analyzed, optimized and documented, several new processes were established and deployed, many documents were created - policies, procedures, guidelines, templates, checklists etc. It also caused some organizational changes: two new departments were created - Standardization and Process Improvement Department (responsible for maintenance and improvement of Rhonda Software Development Process) and Software Quality Assurance Department (responsible for independent control and observance of Rhonda Software Development Process on our projects).

This great effort has not gone to waste - in the middle of 2001 Rhonda was certified as CMM Level 3 Company and then at the end of 2002 Rhonda successfully passed CMM Level 4 certification.

However life does not stand still for our software process. New projects, new technologies and new customers call for continuous process improvement. Our next goal is certification for CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) - the successor of CMM.