Last week I spent 8 days in a small company appraisal, one day as a readiness check, then two days as a pre-appraisal training, and 5 days in formal CMMI 1.2 appraisal as an ATM (Appraisal Team Member).

In the readiness check, we reviewed the PIIDs document and other documents. PIIDs is an excel sheet that maps all CMMI Level 2 practices to Direct Evidences and Indirect Evidences from the appraised company.

In the two days pre-appraisal training, we learned many interesting things about the upcoming formal appraisal, whatever I had learnt the experience of the formal appraisal itself is the real experience that no training will substitute. Here are some of my notes and experiences.

Working as a Team:
In the appraisal, we should work as team. Most of the time the Lead appraisal is facilitating our discussions and decision. Decisions are taken by consensus. It seems strange, but was helpful to objectively discuss our different opinions and encourage members with different views to explain their point of view and try to conclude one decision.

Goals and Practices:
Although (as I learned in Introduction to CMMI 1.2 course) Goals only are mandatory, practices are also important, if you are going to ignore some practices, you should show that you replaced them with other practices that are finally achieve the mandatory goal. In other words, practices are mandatory but can be replaced as long as the goal is met.

Direct Evidence:
For each practice, you should show direct evidence document, this means a lot of documentation, it seems this is not replaceable but I am researching ways to reduce the number of documents needed. Reducing documents to the necessary minimum is important as my focus is on small business where I want to add value and minimize overhead.

Balance between Interviews and Documentation:
You are obliged to balance between documentation and interviews, you got affirmation from interviews you formally hold with team members. CMMI enforce you a minimum set of affirmations to achieve the balance between documentation and affirmations.

Taking Notes:
It was astonishing to know we should take full notes in interviews to remember what was heared and seen. Notes should be accurate as said without paraphrasing. After the interview we should tag the notes with project and Process Area. This helps to see conflicts and get confidence in reporting affirmation.

In the last day we destroyed all our notes per request from our laid appraiser to prevent out of context interpretation to our notes. This makes sense as we already decided about rating the company and finding any mistakes later will not help.

Subpractices Review:
When we feel any doubt about if the evidence is sufficient in a practice, we review the sub-practices and see if there is anything missing.

Overlap and Recursive Applicability:
An overlap is exist between process areas, and between generic practices and process areas. There exist some recursive concepts like plan the plan, or put configuration records in the configuration management system or make quality assurance on the quality assurance activities.

One statement I learnt from our lead appraiser that helped me was “Don’t jump to conclusions”. It showed to me that many time we jump to conclusions that we found wrong after getting more information.

At the last day, all team members wrote their feedback to SEI website, we take pictures and was very happy. Yes the company is appraised as CMMI Level 2.