• Adapt the process
• Balance competing stakeholder priorities
• Collaborate across teams
• Demonstrate value iteratively
• Elevate the level of abstraction
• Focus continuously on quality

from The Rational Edge:  Do you want to know what the missing overall stories are about CMMI? Judith M. Myerson gives an overview of the CMMI with a focus on compliance, risk and governance at each maturity level, and shows you what IBM Rational Software Solutions help achieve maturity 4. She briefly covers the hybrid approach by overlapping CMMI with Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT)

Introduction

In 'An overview of IT frameworks,' the first of the Managing Compliance series on developerWorks Rational, I talked about what IT frameworks are about and how they dictate business processes needed to meet regulatory requirements. I compared standard frameworks, including COBIT® and CMMI®, and showed how you can customize a framework.

In 'Automating COBIT business processes using IBM Rational Portfolio Manager,' the second of the series, I pointed out that COBIT is an IT governance framework that helps to ensure proper control and governance over information and the systems that create, store, and manipulate IT. COBIT provides a framework for putting controls in place to ensure you are compliant with regulations, such as the Sarbanes Oxley (SOX Act) and Basel.

Read More...

Everyone in the software arena seems so busy, but are workers spending their time on productive activities or spinning their wheels? With the average software project exceeding its budget and overrunning its schedule by more than 200 percent, the IT machine is skidding out of control. No wonder companies kill half of the software projects that run more than a year and don’t deploy another 25 percent. To increase software engineering productivity and reduce development costs, IT managers often turn to what they know best—technology and automated tools. Software that automates source code version control, regression testing, and defect tracking are mere bandages. The underlying disease is the epidemic of defects that requires repeated testing, never-ending maintenance releases, and hordes of technical support people. However, increasing quality in software development processes is a more effective approach.

Read More...

from The Rational Edge: The authors describe a four-step process for creating a fully customized software development process based on libraries provided in the Rational Method Composer product.

You can readily find discussion on process implementation and process adoption. But less has been written on starting a process development effort.1 This article addresses the topic of how to jumpstart a process development project from a process tooling perspective.

Rational Method Composer (RMC) provides a unique way to design a customized software development process. The plug-in architecture, re-use through referencing, and the separation of content and process lifecycle provide flexibility in how you construct and tailor a development process. This article describes usage scenarios based on working from the existing RMC method content library to more effectively start your process development effort.