Appendix D: Software Engineering Institute/Capability Maturity Model Overview   SEI stands for the Software Engineering Institute, which is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the US Department of Defense and operated by Carnegie Mellon University. SEI helps organizations and individuals to improve their software engineering management practices. In 1986, the Software Engineering Institute, with assistance from the Mitre Corporation, began the construction of a process maturity framework that would address stabilizing the processes and environment in which software development takes place. This framework is the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). The CMM provides a framework for organizing the evolutionary steps associated with process improvement into five maturity levels that become successive foundations for continuous process improvement. That is, the model strives to quantify an organization's capacity to "consistently and predictably" create high-quality software products. The CMM is made up of five steps or Levels of Maturity. For each level there are Key Process Areas (KPAs). These key process areas identify requirements for achieving each maturity level; Level 1 does not include KPAs since it is the starting point. The table on the following page summarizes the Maturity Levels and their associated KPAs.

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