The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) is the predecessor of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and was initially developed in 1991. At about the same time the ISO 9000 series was developed and led to the conclusion that an improvement of the quality of results can only be sustainably achieved by improving the quality of the processes leading to the result. Subsequently, the approach for CMM was to improve the outcome of projects by improving the quality of the overall processes within a company [KNE06]. Because of the intention to improve the outcome of software projects, CMM has a particular focus on project management processes for highly complex software development projects.  

 

In 1987 the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh started to work on CMM on behalf of the US Department of Defense. The first version (CMM 1.0) was released in 1991. CMM was successful and other versions beside the one for software development, such as a CMM for system integration, emerged. Obviously, no attention was paid to compatibility issues between the models which resulted in many incompatible CMMs.  

Hence, a project was launched to overcome the pitfall of having many incompatible maturity models. The idea was to create an overall framework for the integration of different maturity models. This framework should assure that different maturity models can be applied together and led to the Capability Maturity Model Integration which was introduced as version 1.0 in 2000.