03/17/2007, Valladolid - Spain

Codice Software's innovative approach to product development and quality has been validated by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), whose assessment team has awarded Codice a Level II Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI) rating.

The CMMI rating is the global standard reserved for those companies exhibiting world-class product development capabilities. This model offers benefits to every company, going from saving on development costs, an increase on productivity and planning improvement to increasing significantly the quality of the finished product which implies a higher level of satisfaction among its customers.

About 30 companies were certified by CMMI at different levels, but none of them were small companies.  We have not only been the first small Spanish company awarded CMMI, but we also offer our Consultancy Services to other companies working on being CMMI certified.

 Codice’s aim to be certified CMMi started in 2005. The company started its improvement process and was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Industry through an initiative to improve the quality on the software industry.  The software process offers special features which make its CMMI adoption even more interesting as the development team is using an agile methodology, SCRUM, based on empirical control of processes and which is usually considered as incompatible with CMMI.

Agile methodologies, broadly used from 2000, promote the developers commitment to the project as well as flexibility towards change.

Many software companies such as Microsoft or Google are adopting agile methodologies in order to dynamize their software deliveries.

Codice was also a pioneer on adopting SCRUM in our county and has been able to get the best out of both worlds (SCRUM and CMMI) creating a flexible and at the same time defined process.

The most important benefits of CMMI level II are:

• A more disciplined project management
• Different policies to be defined and followed by the company
• Processes are planned, described and documented 
• Responsibilities are defined within the methodology and lifecycle

Scrum Overview

You can also read about our CMMI achivement on Webwire and CMCrossroads