e-Talk Radio: Paulk, Mark, 28 November 2000

TEXT TRANSCRIPT: 28 November 2000
Copyright 2001 Quality Plus Technologies and Carol Dekkers. All rights reserved.

Welcome to Quality Plus! E-talk with Carol Dekkers. This program will focus on the latest in the field of technology. All comments, views and opinions are those of the host, guests, and callers. Now let's join Carol Dekkers.

Carol: Welcome to Quality Plus! E-talk this week. I'm Carol Dekkers. And I run a company called Quality Plus Technologies, which is a management consulting firm where we specialize in using measurement to help companies to build better software. I've had a number of guests over the last several weeks. And we've talked about everything from technology to do with the Florida election, to do with the Palm Beach County. We've talked a little bit last week with Ed Yourdon about extreme programming and the Capability Maturity Model. And every week it seems to build. We seem to get better and better guests.

I feel very, very privileged this week to be able to introduce you to one of the true greats in the software industry -- I'd like to introduce you now to Mark Paulk, who is a senior member of the technical staff at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University. He was the project leader during the development of the software Capability Maturity Model Version 1.1. And he's also actively involved with software engineering standards, including ISO 15504, which is a software lifecycle process--no, I just messed that up. It's the framework, software process framework, the ISO 12207 standard, which is the software lifecycle processes standard, and the ISO 15288. Prior to joining the Software Engineering Institute, Mark was a senior systems analyst for Systems Incorporation at the Ballistic Missile Defense Advanced Research Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He has degrees in mathematics and computer science from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and Vanderbilt University. Mark is a senior member of the IEEE and a senior member of the American Society for Quality. He's an ASQ certified software quality engineer and an SEI lead assessor. And one of the best things that I like about Mark is that he's, underneath all of this pomp and ceremony and fame, he's a real down-to-earth person. So I'd like to welcome you to the show, Mark.

Mark: Okay, thank you very much for those kind words. It makes me sound a whole lot better than I am in all truth, but I'll take that with a certain degree of salt, I guess.

Carol: That's a high maturity person that it takes to say that.

Mark: Thank you very much.

Carol: To get started, tonight our topic is high maturity processes in software. And to get started, Mark, we've had different people talk over the last few weeks about the CMM and that acronym. And if you could just spend a couple of minutes talking to our listening audience who may be new to the show and just tell them a little bit about what is the CMM. What are we talking about, about high maturity processes?

Mark: Okay. The CMM, the Capability Maturity Model for software was actually inspired by some of the work that Phil Crosby did with his maturity grid and his work with zero defect products and the total quality management movement several years ago. Watts Humphrey is the person who initially articulated the software process maturity framework back in 1987. And what he observed was that there were some common patterns, if you will, in terms of how software organizations and software projects got into trouble. And so he applied some of