Several years ago, I worked for a few weeks as a tester on a big retail project. The project was spectacularly mismanaged, already a year behind schedule by the time I arrived. Just before I left, the oft-revised target date slipped by another three months. Three months later, the project was deployed, then pulled out of production for another six months to be fixed. Project managers and a CIO, among many others, lost their jobs. The company pinned an eight-figure loss on the project.
The software infrastructure was supplied by a big database company, and the software to glue everything together was supplied by development organization in another country. That software was an embarrassment—bloated, incoherent, hard to use, and buggy. Fixes were rarely complete and often introduced new bugs. At one point during my short tenure, all effective worked stopped for five days because the development organization’s servers crashed and no backups were available. All this despite the fact that the software development company claimed CMMI Level 5.
This morning, I was greeted by a Tweet that said
“Deloittes show how a level 5 CMMi company has bad test process at #TMMi conf in Korea! So CMMi needs TMMi – good.”
The TMMi is the Testing Maturity Model Integration. Here’s what the TMMi Foundation says about it:
“The Test Maturity Model Integration has been developed to complement the existing CMMI framework. It provides a structured presentation of maturity levels, allowing for standard TMMi assessments and certification, enabling a consistent deployment of the standards and the collection of industry metrics.”
Here’s what the SEI—the CMMi’s co-ordinator and sponsor—says about it:
“CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) is a process improvement approach that provides organizations with the essential elements of effective processes, which will improve their performance. CMMI-based process improvement includes identifying your organization’s process strengths and weaknesses and making process changes to turn weaknesses into strengths.”
What conclusions could we draw from these three statements?
If a company has achieved CMMI Level 5, yet has a bad test process, then there’s a logical problem here. Either testing isn’t an essential element of effective processes (in which case the TMMI should be unnecessary) or it is (in which case the SEI’s claim of providing the essential processes is unsupportable).
One clear solution to the problem would be to adjudicate all this by way of a Maturity Model Maturity Model (Integrated), the MMMMI, whereby your organization can determine (in a mature fashion, of course) what essential processes are in the first place. Mind you, that could be flawed too. You’d need a set of essential processes to determine how to determine essential processes, so you’ll also need a Maturity Model Maturity Model Maturity Model (Integrated), an MMMMMMI. And in fairly short order, your organization will disappear up its own ass.
Jerry Weinberg points in a different direction, using very strong language. This is from Quality Software Management, Volume 1: Systems Thinking, p. 21:
…cultural patterns are not more or less mature, they are just more or less fitting. Of course, some people have an emotional need for perfection, and they will impose this emotional need on everything they do. Their comparisons have nothing to do with the organization’s problems, but with their own.
“The quest for unjustified perfection is not mature, but infantile.
“Hitler was quite clear on who was the ‘master race’. His definition of Aryan race was supposed to represent the mature end product of all human history, and that allowed Hitler and the Nazis to justify atrocities on “less mature” cultures such as Gypsies, Catholics, Jews, Poles, Czechs, and anyone else who got in their way. Many would-be reformers of software engineering require their ‘targets’ to confess to their previous inferiority. These little Hitlers have not been very successful.
“Very few healthy people will make such a confession voluntarily, and even concentration camps didn’t cause many people to change their minds. This is not ‘just a matter of words’. Words are essential to any change project because they give us models of the world as it was and as we hope it to be. So if your goal is changing an organization, start by dropping the comparisons such as those implied in the loaded term ‘maturity.'”
It’s time for us, the worldwide testing community, to urge Deloitte, the SEI, the TMMI, and the unfortunate testers in Korea who are presently being exposed to the nonsense to recognize what many of us have known for years: maturity models have it backwards.