What small businesses and small organizations say about the CMM

The US Air Force sponsored research within the Department of Defense software development community to determine the applicability of the Software Engineering Institute´s capability maturity model (CMM) for software to small businesses and small software organizations. The research found that small businesses are faced not only with a lack of resources and funds required to implement many of the practices stated in the CMM, but also with the task of basing their process improvement initiatives on practices that do not apply to a small business and small software organization. This paper discusses, from industry´s perspective, why small businesses and organizations are experiencing difficulties implementing CMM-based process improvement programs and how they are tailoring their approach to the CMM to meet their quality goals