What is Quality?

          Watts S. Humprey is known as the “Father of Software Quality”. He was the one who developed the Capability Maturity Model. He earned his Bachelor of Science of in Physics degree from University of Chicago, Master of Science in Physics degree from Illinois Institute of Technology Physics Department, and Master of Business Administration degree from University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. He was previously the Vice President of IBM but he retired in 1986 and joined the Software Engineering Institute located at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is also in that year that the active development of this model began. Due to U.S. Air Force’s request, he began formalizing his Process Maturity Framework which originally aims to help the U.S. Department of Defense in evaluating the capability of software contractors as part of awarding contracts.

          Humphrey used Philip B. Crosby’s Quality Management Maturity Grid as a basis to his framework. What differs Humphrey’s approach from Crosby’s is his unique insight that organizations mature their processes in stages based on solving process problems in a specific order. Thus, although at first his model was intended for the benefit of U.S. Department of Defense, it became a general and powerful tool for understanding and improving general business process performance used by different organizations (e.g. software developers).

           For Watt S. Humphrey, [software] quality refers to achieving excellent levels of fitness for use. It is the result of having good software process management which holds the principle that if the development process is under statistical control, a consistently better result can only be produced by improving the process. And the development process is gauged by maturity levels which is a 5-level process maturity continuum - where the uppermost (5th) level is a notional ideal state where processes would be systematically managed by a combination of process optimization and continuous process improvement. The levels are: Level 1 – Initial (Chaotic) ; Level 2 – Repeatable ; Level 3 – Defined ; Level 4 – Managed; and Level 5 – Optimizing.

PPT Link [Google Docs]: Capability Maturity Model

Sources:

(n.d.). Capability Maturity Model. Retrieved November 21, 2012 from           http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model#Development_at_SEI

(n.d.). Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK). Retrieved November 21, 2012 from http://www.computer.org/portal/web/swebok/html/ch11

(n.d.). Watts Humphrey. Retrieved November 21, 2012 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Humphrey

Humphrey, W. S. (1987). Characterizing the Software Process: A Maturity Framework. Retrieved November 21, 2012 from ftp://ftp.sei.cmu.edu/pub/documents/87.reports/pdf/tr11.pdf.