What tools should a small organisation implementing CMMI equip themselves with? An easy question but a little more difficult to answer directly as the response will be dependent on the availability of skills, experience, infrastructure, budget and above all the processes that the tool will be supporting.
In an earlier blog (How I fell in love with a wiki) I outlined the benefits of using a wiki in a small organisation that acheived CMMI maturity level 2 last year.
Was the wiki instrumental in this? Yes. It was key to quickly and easily capturing and disseminating information about requirements and their status, process descriptions, plans, status reports, measurements, issues, actions and risks. It was a good no-nonsense process asset library.
Was it the only tool that could be used by a small organisation? No. Other specialist tools were used for configuration management, project scheduling, automated testing and defect reporting/tracking. These provided functionality that would have been too costly for a small organisation to build into or fully integrate with a wiki. Excel spreadsheets were quickly developed as a low cost effective solution for timesheets, quality assurance checklists, resource planning and measurement data capture and analysis. In larger organisations some or all of this functionality is acquired through off the shelf software packages.
Can the Wiki be improved? Yes. Some of the data on the wiki could make more use of spreadsheets to improve overall productivity and maintenace. For example a small organisation would find it cost effective to maintain requirements traceability and estimation workbooks on well designed spreadsheets rather than trying to maintain these on a wiki.
So the challenge for a small organisation with a wiki is to get the right balance between the benefits of flexibility, ease of use, speed of deployment, appropriate functionality and the overall cost of maintainance, licences and deployment. Above all ensure it meets your process needs.
