Abstract—Software Quality frameworks like CMMI and

Standards like ISO 9000 are understood mostly as applicable

for large development projects in large organizations. One

reason for this misconception is the amount of documentation

that is demanded by these frameworks/standards.

Education (especially Engineering Colleges) is one area

where practices of software quality processes have not yet

gained any foothold and offers a highly hostile environment for

implementation of any quality framework, even though all the

processes/procedures laid down in CMMI or ISO are equally

applicable for them.

An attempt is made to bring paradigm shift of developing

simple software tools and deploy them in Engineering Colleges

to meet certain mandatory requirements. Attempt is made to

use the CMMI specific practices and some ISO 9001 specified

practices and bring-in the necessary process change

management into the education system.

Index Terms—CMMI, education, ISO 9000, SARU.

I. INTRODUCTION

The different standards in technical education in India are

set by different agencies like University Grants Commission

(UGC), State Technical Education Boards and All India

Council of Technical Education (AICTE) through numerous

standards like affiliations to universities, recognitions,

certifications like NBA (National Board of Accreditation)

and National Assessment and Accreditation Council

(NAAC) etc. But most of these standards concentrate on

infrastructure of the institutes, faculty qualifications and

experience, student intake ranks and placements etc as well

as on aspects like improvements in faculty qualifications,

research, support staff status etc. None of these standards

concentrate on the processes practiced or defined in the

colleges where as frameworks like CMMI [1] or Standards

like ISO 9000 [2] deal with processes and procedures to be

followed in day to day activities. Definition and

Implementation of such processes/procedures can greatly

improve the educational standards, efficiency of teaching,

and in maintaining the standards that are demanded by

different agencies as listed above.

Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University (JNTU) [3] is

one of the world‟s largest technological universities

providing opportunities for technical education in India and

catering to the needs of the state of Andhra Pradesh. JNTU

Manuscript received November

30, 2012; revised March 27, 2013.

S.

Ramakrishna

is with Aurora‟s Engineering College,

India

(email:

Ramakrishna_seemakurti@yahoo.com).

has several hundreds of Engineering Colleges under its

affiliation out which more than 90% colleges are run by

Private Managements. Most of these colleges are owned by

non-academicians and run as purely commercial business

rather than with any academic interests or with the aim of

providing quality education. Hence, manipulations to meet

the requirements of the various regulatory bodies are

compromised and wide scale manipulations are the usual

practices.

Hence, any attempt to standardize any process or practice

that is seen as threat to the manipulative power at different

levels is considered as a threat to the profit and highly is

discouraged by the college managements. There are

however few exceptions to these general perceptions where

the managements are professional and committed for

providing quality education. Ramakrishna [4] describes the

challenges posed by some of the hostile environments for

process implementation.

As a part of meeting educational standards the university

requires two important parameters that need to be measured

and satisfied for qualifying students for the next semester

are minimum 75% of the attendance of classes held which

are relaxed up to a maximum of 10% in case of severe

health problems where applicable and the coverage of

specified syllabus. The colleges are required to maintain the

physical attendance registers of students and report the

attendance periodically to the university to determine the

eligibility of students for promoting next semester/year. The

second requirement of syllabus coverage is met by

monitoring the topics covered as per lesson plans prepared

at the beginning of semesters and monitored by comparing

them with the day to day topics covered in the classes that

are recorded in the attendance registers.

To meet this requirement most of the colleges maintain

physical records of the students‟ attendance which are prone

to high level of manipulations at faculty end, data

consolidation end and college management level. Even for

sincere managements, it is very difficult to monitor the

correctness of the attendance maintained by faculty due to

the availability of physical records with faculty that are

scattered across different departments and located in

different rooms or buildings within the college campus..

Most of the honest college managements wish to overcome

the menace of manipulations and look for cheap solutions as

both initial cost and up-gradation cost is of prime

consideration due to the limited income from fee and

mounting expenses of maintaining the colleges.

An attempt is made in this direction by bringing in some

changes in the practices and practiced processes by

employing CMMI framework and ISO 9000 standards by

Implementation of CMMI Framework in Small Projects

in Small Organizations (An Example of Implementation

in Education Domain)

S. Ramakrishna, Member IACSIT

156DOI: 10.7763/LNSE.2013.V1.35

Lecture Notes on Software Engineering, Vol. 1, No. 2, May 2013

taking up a small project that includes development of

simple in-house developed MS Excel Based tool and

deploying it across all sections of all classes of all

departments through process change management practices

of CMMI.

The project of developing such tools qualifies to be a

small project and the organization (Engineering College)

can be qualified to be a small organization [5], [6].

Implementation of CMMI Framework in such environment

is shown to be feasible with some changes/adoptions of

practices which highlight the need to tailor these

frameworks/standards.

Implementation of simple tools and minor process

changes demonstrate the rich gains reaped in the hitherto

unexplored domain of education by the quality frameworks.

II. THE PROJECT

The project is to develop a simple tool that can capture

the attendance of students and topics covered in each class

and make available the information to all stake holders in

real time. The tool has to be simple and easy to use by all

faculties, especially those who do not have IT exposure, as

well as the Data Entry Operators (DEOs). Further, it should

be easy to use by the Head of the Departments, Principals

and Deans, most of whom were never exposed to any

software tools and are not comfortable with online

information access. The tool is to be developed in house

without any extra resources, has to be easy to maintain and

upgrade and meet the managements requirements, customer

delighting factors apart from meeting mandatory

requirements.

The project has six parts:

1) Requirements gathering

2) Tool Development

3) Training different kinds of stakeholders

4) Deployment of the tool across all departments

5) Data maintenance and

6) Tool updation.

A. The Tool

The tool (called “Student Attendance Record Updation ,”

„SARU‟ for short) is a set of simple Microsoft Excel based

spreadsheets that are password protected and populated by

the different stake holders like faculty teaching the

subjects/taking labs, to which others add relevant data. It is

small tool expected to bring good change in the attendance

process [7].

B. The Tool’s Evolution

Basic Version (V1.0): One XL spread sheet for each

month for each section of a class. Each spread sheet

contains one worksheet per subject to capture the attendance

of students along with topics covered

Revised Version (V1.1): Section-wise Monthly Summary

Report for each student is generated for all subjects and labs

together.

Version 2: Captures Examination attendance data (Mid

Examinations and Supplementary Examinations, each with

its own set of rules)

Revised Version (V2.1) Captures Exempted attendance

data and presumptive attendance data and generates overall

report.

Future Versions: 1) Captures Fee details and alumni

information 2) College Level Consolidation and 3)

Interfacing with SMS (Short Message Services) to inform

parents of students about the day‟s attendance

C. The Requirements

The tool has to meet three different kinds of requirements:

Mandatory Requirements imposed by University rules

Management Requirements and Stakeholder Delights

(especially that of management).

The Details of the tool and Details of Requirements are

described by Ramakrishna [8].

D. Management Constraints

Development Cost to be nil

Updation cost and tool maintenance cost to be nil

Staff training effort to be minimal

Ease of use

Data updation time not to be more than 5 minutes for

each faculty for each subject. Monthly mandatory data entry

to be less than 15 minutes at the beginning of each month.

DEO‟s time to generate monthly templates for all sections

of all classes in each department to be minimal

Availability of the tool for access from staff rooms using

intranet.

E. The Stake Holders

Faculty

Data Entry Operators

Principal, Heads of Departments

Examination Branch

Accounts

Student Discipline Committee Members

Deans

Computer Science Department

F. Process Changes

Existing Practice: Manual Practices of extracting data

from physical registers and generating the report

Proposed Practice:

1) Every faculty has to enter the details in the tool soon

after the class is over. DEOs generates the monthly

templates for each section

2) Examination branch enters the examination attendance

(mid as well as supplementary)

3) Exempted data (Medical and special occasions) is

entered by Head of each department Examination

Branch also enters presumptive attendance just before

the end of each semester as it is common across all

sections of all classes of all departments in the college

4) Faculty enters any incident involving students that needs

disciplinary action and

5) Student Discipline committee members enter incidents

involving students that attract disciplinary actions.

G. Reports

The tool generates different reports like consolidated

attendance for the month (that can be directly sent to

university and can be displayed for students‟ information.

Ramakrishna [8] describes the steps and challenges of

bringing-in the change management of acceptance of the

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Lecture Notes on Software Engineering, Vol. 1, No. 2, May 2013

tool and process changes as well as beneficial fruits of

successes and acceptance of the tool.

III. APPLICATION OF CMMI FRAMEWORK AND ISO 9000

STANDARDS

Observing the tool development and process change

management right from conceptual stage to deployment and

enhancement stages, it can be seen that almost 85% of the

specific practices of CMMI Version 1.3 are utilized, except

for those requiring organization wide processes definitions.

TABLE I: DETAILS OF SP WISE ACTIVITIES DONE

Sl. PA SGs SPs A1* A2# A3#

L2 15 54 40 8 1 REQM 1 5 5

2 PP 3 14 14R1

3 PMC 2 10 10

4 SAM 2 6 0R2

5 MA 2 8 5

1.1,

1.3. 1.4

6 PPQA 2 4 3 2.2

7 CM 3 7 3

1.2,1.3,

3.1,3.2

L3 26 86 75 4 7

8 RD 3 10 9 2.3

9 TS 3 8 8

10 PI 3 9 9R3

11 Ver 3 8 8

12 Val 2 5 5

13 OPF 3 9 9

14 OPD 1 7R4 All 7

15 OT 2 7 7

16 IPM 2 10 7

1.1,1.2,

1.7

17 RSKM 3 7 7

18 DAR 1 6 6

L4 3 12 4 4

19 OPP 1 5 2

1.3,1.4,

1.5

20 QPM 2 7 6 1.4

L5 5 15 14 1

21 OPM 3 10 10

22 CAR 2 5 4 2.3

167 137 17 7

R1: SP 2.1 of PP: Budget not applicable R2: Applicable in future when SMS package is

planned

R3: SP 2.1 of PI: Needed only when interfacing with

SMS package, but interfacing within the product are

identified R4:Formal procedures not written *A1: Activities Done #A2, A3 Refer Table-2

The generic practices cannot be said to be implemented

as the college managements have no such commitments as

needed by the CMMI framework or ISO 9000 standards.

The Application of the specific practices of CMMI

framework to this small project in a small organization

demonstrates that process frameworks that are basically

meant for large software development projects can be easily

tailored to apply to small projects, small organizations or

both.

The one great hurdle in extending the CMMI framework

or ISO 9000 standard to small projects and/or small

organizations is the documentation requirements, which

when minimized can make these frame works/standards

excellent tools for developing the practiced processes rather

than defined processes. This project demonstrates that

almost all specific practices of CMMI can be implemented

in small projects and/or small organizations without the

specified formal definition of processes and still achieve all

the benefits of formally defined processes/procedures.

TABLE II: LIST OF A2 & A3 SPECIFIC PRACTICES

Sl. PA

SP

No SP Details

Level-2

1 MA 1.1 Establish Measmnt Objectives

2 MA 1.3 Specify Data Coll and Strge Proc

3 MA 1.4 Specify Analysis Procedures

4 PPQA 2.2 Establish Records

5 CM 1.2 Establish a Config Mgmt System

6 CM 1.3 Create or Release Baselines

7 CM 3.1 Establish Config Mgmt Records

8 CM 3.2 Perform Configuration Audits

Leve-3

9 RD 2.3 Identify Interface Requirements

10 OPD 1.1 Establish Standard Processes

11 OPD 1.2 Establish Lifecycle Model Desc

12 OPD 1.3 Establish Tlrng Crit &Guidelines

13 OPD 1.4 Estab the Orgnztn’s Msrmt Repstry

14 OPD 1.5 Estab Orgnzn’s Proc Asset Lib

15 OPD 1.6 Estab Work Envirnmnt Stds

16 OPD 1.7 Estab Rules and Gdlnsfor Teams

17 IPM 1.1 Estab Project’s Dfd Procs

18 IPM 1.2

Use Organizational Process Assets for

Planning Project Activities

19 IPM 1.7 Contribute to Organizl Proc Assets

Level-4

20 OPP 1.3 Establish Proc Perf Measures

21 OPP 1.4

Analyze Proc Perf Measures and

Establish Proc Perf Baselines

22 OPP 1.5 Establish Proc Perf Models

23 QPM 1.4 Select Msrs and Anlytic Techns

Level-5

24 CAR 2.3 Record Causal Analysis Data

The Mathematical Model Adopted in Arriving at the

percentage computation of implementing the specific

Practices of CMMI in small projects is:

IP= (Total Number of Specific Practices applicable upto a

given level– total number of Specific Practices that are not

implemented)/Total Number of Applicable Specific

Practices

IP stands for Implementation Percentage.

As the implementation of CMMI in Education is

attempted on single process on experimental basis the

general practices are not considered in the model which are

applicable if the implementation is adopted for all the

applicable processes.

Table I shows the application status of different specific

practices in this project spanning across all the 22 process

areas in all the 4 different levels of 2 to 5 of CMMI-Dev V

1.3. Out of total 167 specific practices (SPs), the 6 SPs

belonging to SAM Process Area (PA) are not applicable.

Out of the remaining 161 applicable SPs 137 (85% of total

SPs) are adopted in this project as detailed in this table. The

implementation details can be found in [4], [8]. Out of the

remaining 24 SPs, 17 SPs can be practiced with some more

effort and management‟s commitment, covering 96% SPs,

but remembering that the procedures are not documented for

any of the Pas, but all support documentation like

calculation sheets, metrics data captured etc is available in

raw form.

Table II gives the details of the 24 specific practices that

are not implemented in this project.

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Lecture Notes on Software Engineering, Vol. 1, No. 2, May 2013

In addition to the application of the CMMI Framework,

the audit practices as detailed in ISO 9001 standard are

implemented for the physical verification of attendance

registers as well as to the data entered in the tool by

independent audit teams constituted for this purpose.

IV. CONCLUSIONS

Application of CMMI framework and ISO 9000 standard

practices into educational field, especially engineering

colleges has immense benefits. The specific practices of

CMMI can be easily implemented in small projects and

small organizations with suitable tailoring to these frame

works, by cutting down the documentation requirements.

REFERENCES

[1] CMMI for Development SEI Technical Report CMMI-Dev V1.3-2010.

[2] Quality Management Systems – Requirements, ISO standard 9001-

2008

[3] JNTU Hyderabad website. [Online]. Available:

http://www.jntuh.ac.in/new/.

[4] S. Ramakrishna, “Success and Failure of Process Change

Management in Hostile Environments,” presented at International

Multi Conference on Automation, Computing, Control,

Communication and Compressed Sensing, Palai, Kerala, India, March

22-23, 2013.

[5] A. Brettle. (Mar. 2011). CMMI and Small Organizations–The

Resource Challenge. [Online]. Available:

http://cmmi.net/2011/03/22/cmmi-and-small-organisations-the-

resource - challenge.

[6] S. Cepeda. (Aug. 2008). Is CMMI Useful and Usable in Small

Settings? [Online]. Available: http://www.crosstalkonline.org/

storage/issue-archives/2008/ 200802/200802-Cepeda. pdf.

[7] A. Frazier and D. Chin, “Why good tools never make it out of the

gate,” presented at SEPG Conference, North America, 2011.

[8] S. Ramakrishna, “A Small Change in Process: Big Leap in Adoption

of Software Quality Standards in Education (SARU – An Example),”

presented at 2nd International Science Congress, Mathura, India, Dec.

8-9, 2012.

Andhra Pradesh, India on 20th June 1953. This author

became a Member (M) of IACSIT. The author has

obtained his BE degree in Electronics and

Communications Engineering from Andhra University,

Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India in 1975 and his

ME degree in Control Systems from the same university in 1978. Currently he is pursuing his Ph D in Computer Science

Engineering from Jagadish Prasad Jabharmal Technical University,

Jhunjunu, Rajasthan, India.

He is currently working as PROFESSOR in Aurora‟s Engineering

College, Bhongir, Nalgonda District, Andhra Pradesh, India and worked as

PROFESSOR in Bharat Institute of Engineering and Technology,

Jawaharlal Nehru Institute Technology and Vidya Bharati Institute of

Technology before his current assignment. Prior to entering into

educational field he was with Reliance Communications, Reliance

Industries, Satyam Computer Services, Wipro Global R&D, Aeronautical

Development Agency and Vikram Sarabhai Sapce Center in various

capacities such as GENERAL MANAGER, SENIOR CONSUTLANT,

SOFTWARE SEPCIALIST and SCIENTIST/ENGINEER etc. His current

research interests include Software Quality Models Integration and

Applications, Improvements in Software Quality Process Audits and

Appraisals.

Prof Seemakurti is a member of Computer Society of India,(CSI),

Society of R&D Managers of India (SRMI), Systems Society of India (SSI)

and Fellow Member of International Science Congress Association (ISCA). .

159

Ramakrishna Seemakurti was born at Visahapatnam,

Lecture Notes on Software Engineering, Vol. 1, No. 2, May 2013