Selecting CMMI Appraisal Classes Based on Maturity and Openness

Over the last eight years, different approaches have been used to diagnose the performance in ABB organizations developing software. The efforts build to a large degree on methods from the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). In this paper we examine the experiences from five organizations through a description of the pathways that we have observed in the maturity development. We also propose a way to classify organizations based on two organizational characteristics, maturity and openness. Based on this classification, a simple method for the selection of how to collect performance data from the organizations is described.