Maturity Status within Front-End Support Organisations

It may not be enough to develop mature processes at the back-end support level. Other strongly collaborating front-end support processes may substantially undermine them. For this reason, we have created CM³: front-end problem management - a detailed problem management process model to be utilised at the front-end support level. In this paper, we present the CM³ maturity levels at the front-end support and match them against the industrial state of practice within 15 software organisations. Our goal is to establish the current status of support maturity using CM³: front-end problem management. Our results show that the industrial processes studied suffice to provide basic problem management support at the front-end support level. However, only two out of 15 organisations studied have almost achieved the highest maturity level.