Summary

Establish and maintain definitions of measures to be included in the organization’s process performance analyses.

Description

Refer to the Measurement and Analysis (MA) (CMMI-DEV) area for more information about specifying measures.


Example Work Products



  1. Definitions of selected measures of process performance with rationale for their selection including traceability to selected processes or subprocesses


Subpractices



1. Select measures that reflect appropriate attributes of the selected processes or subprocesses to provide insight into the organization’s quality and process performance.

It is often helpful to define multiple measures for a process or subprocess to understand the impact of changes to the process and avoid sub-optimization. Also, it is often helpful to establish measures for both product and process attributes for the selected process and subprocess, as well as its inputs, outputs, and resources (including people and the skill they bring) consumed.

The Goal Question Metric paradigm is an approach that can be used to select measures that provide insight into the organization’s quality and process performance objectives. It is often useful to analyze how these quality and process performance objectives can be achieved based on an understanding of process performance provided by the selected measures.

 

Examples of criteria used to select measures include the following:
  • Relationship of measures to the organization’s quality and process performance objectives
  • Coverage that measures provide over the life of the product or service
  • Visibility that measures provide into process performance
  • Availability of measures
  • Frequency at which observations of the measure can be collected
  • Extent to which measures are controllable by changes to the process or subprocess
  • Extent to which measures represent the end users’ view of effective process performance



2. Establish operational definitions for the selected measures.

Refer to the Measurement and Analysis (MA) (CMMI-DEV) process area for more information about specifying measures.



3. Incorporate selected measures into the organization’s set of common measures.

Refer to the Organizational Process Definition (OPD) (CMMI-DEV) process area for more information about establishing organizational process assets.



4. Revise the set of measures as necessary.

Measures are periodically evaluated for their continued usefulness and ability to indicate process effectiveness.