A Comparative Analysis of Agile Methods and the Capacity Maturity Model Integration (CMMI)

Abstract

Quality issue is an important aspect of system development which is defined by a range of plausible elements such as correctness, efficiency, scalability, modularity, maintainability, speed etc. To provide better quality of software than the ones offered by the usual traditional approaches of software development process, new methods like agile methodology was introduced. However, since its introduction, there have been keen contentions as to whether agile methodology offers more advantages than a typical traditional methodology or its numerous “flavours”- that is, a methodology which evolved from a typical traditional approach e.g. the Capacity Maturity Model integration - CMMI. Recent works to determine best practices addressed by three Methodologies shows that both agile and the Capacity Maturity Model integration are now widely used methods in system development process. However, they make different but unique contributions to overall project quality control. Here in this work (using relevant previous works as background), analysis of these two great methods- Agile and CMMI is presented by taken into consideration the fundamental components of both methods, their views about quality, perspective from project management and software development, contributions to overall project quality control and concluded on compatibility of the two methods within the same project. Findings from this work and existing data showed that both can be used in same project to get desirable quality.