The purpose of CMMI for Development is to help organizations improve their development and maintenance processes for both products and services. CMMI for Development is a collection of best practices that is generated from the CMMI Framework.[1] The CMMI Framework supports the CMMI Product Suite by allowing multiple models, training courses, and appraisal methods to be generated that support specific areas of interest.

A constellation is a collection of CMMI components that includes a model, its training materials, and appraisal-related documents for an area of interest. Currently there are three planned constellations supported by the version 1.2 model framework: development, services, and acquisition. “Additions” are used to expand constellations for specific additional content.

This document contains the CMMI for Development constellation and contains both the base CMMI-DEV as well as CMMI-DEV with the IPPD addition (CMMI-DEV+IPPD).

If you are not using IPPD, ignore the information that is marked “IPPD Addition,” and you will be using the CMMI for Development model.

Unlike CMMI version 1.1, there is but a single model document that describes both the staged and continuous approaches to process improvement versus the prior use of two representations of staged and continuous in separate documents. This consolidated presentation of model material for both approaches was first used in the book, CMMI: Guidelines for Process Integration and Product Improvement. Thanks to Peter Gordon, publishing partner at Addison-Wesley Professional, and the book’s authors, Mary Beth Chrissis, Mike Konrad, and Sandy Shrum, we were able to use the book’s manuscript as the basis for developing CMMI version 1.2 [Chrissis 2003].