Do you have a list of documents we need to achieve CMMI?

Hey Jeff!!

I need a help from you. Can you provide me the list of work products needed to achieve CMMI in our organization? 

Let me ask you this.  Should you reach your destination in a car by looking at the white line in the road through your rear-view mirror?  

This kind of "reverse engineering" of the CMMI was never really intended by the authors.  The documents you are referring should be the product produced from performing a process.  

So, if you conduct an estimate using "wide-band delphi" the work products, or "documents," you produce may include the three or more estimates developed by the assigned estimators, the list of tasks in a WBS, and the output of the formal estimate.

If I said, go produce an estimate, you might just sit at your desk and type one up without executing the process.  But you would have "the document."  Does that mean you performed the process? No, it means you typed in your best guess of the estimate.  And it definitely doesn't mean your CMMI ML2.

The CMMI does expect you to produce a "direct artifact" and an "indirect artifact" (in most cases).  This is not the same as saying that all you need is the artifact.  They are merely a consequence of the process being performed. You must also produce evidence that you actually followed a process.

There is a list of "suggested work products" in the CMMI book that you COULD use as a guide, but this list is highly dependant upon your company, methodology, and culture.  

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I'm new to CMMI 1.2 and I don't understand the distinction between direct and indirect evidence.

I am in my first year of learning CMMI v1.2 and have participated as an ATM on a few appraisals; however, I still have trouble fully understanding the distinctions between direct and indirect evidence. I do not understand why the concept of ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ flips in certain work/product instances. Why is this, and can you provide some assistance here?

First, welcome to the world of CMMI! It's a fascinating place where the more you learn about it, the more you'll understand how it can help improve software performance.

It sounds like you already know the basics: direct evidence is something that is the direct consequence of a process being performed. Note: these are the things that organizations who are trying to "game the system" create in order to "prove" they're performing at MLx. This, of course, is nonsense. It's FAR easier to just perform the process and accept what naturally falls out of it as the "right" evidence, but you just can't reason with some people!

The formula for achieving a "fully implemented" characterization on a practice is: Direct + (Indirect or Affirmation). So an indirect is not always required.

Indirect evidence is something that corroborates the direct evidence. If a task in a work plan and a meeting invitation on a calendar both refer to a code walkthrough, they are indirect evidence of the code review (e.g.; we planned for it and we invited people). Other indirect evidence may be meeting minutes, notes, and an agenda for the code review.

Using that example for VER SG2 the direct is the code review results and the indirect is any or all of the examples I gave.

When would this be flipped? Well, for VER SG1 we are "preparing" for peer reviews. Part of preparing is planning for them and inviting people, right? So the indirect for SG2 could be the direct for SG1! And an indirect for "prepare" - VER SG1) COULD be the code review results (they happened as planned, so we must have prepared for them).

There is a larger point here - one that will greatly reduce your overhead and increase efficiency. When planning and designing your process, think in terms of these "flipped" and "shared" work products. If you do, you'll end up with 50 instead of 400 artifacts - and your engineers will be pretty pleased about that!

Finally, remember that CMMI isn't about "evidence." We shouldn't create evidence to "pass" an appraisal. We should execute the process appropriately, and the evidence will take care of itself.

http://www.broadswordsolutions.com/