Customer Rating: 
Summary: Old but Good
Comment: Even though the model has been revised, this is still a good book and an excellent place to start if you are going to be involved in CMM(I).
Customer Rating: 
Summary: a book of lists - a reference book
Comment: The book offers a way to impose discipline on the entire software development process. It targets large software projects, where there are numerous programmers, and where the eventual code base might number millions of lines. The CMM may let you manage a scaling of effort that can yield a successful project, on time and on budget. No guarantees, mind you. But Carnegie Mellon's authors have extensively studied this field and their advice is generally considered sound.
The text is deliberately written as a set of lists, where a list consists of tasks to be done. This is not a book you necessarily read for insight. A book of lists, come on! Rather, you have some experience with CMM, from other texts or live instruction. And you then use this book for specific tasks. This is a reference book, like a dictionary, if you will.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The "GUIDE" for CMM
Comment: The book is a good one, but I , as a person new to implementing software process improvement in my small organization read this book and it just flew over my head, it needs a HIGH LEVEL of understanding the process - to be precise.
The materials in this book are available as downloadable PDFs in the SEI-CMM site for all the KPAs.
Customer Rating:
Summary: rehash of TR24 and TR25 - easier to use than the PDF files
Comment: . .you need this book. everyone I know doing SW-CMM has a copy. It is a simpler easier to use copy of the CMM.
You could get TR24 and TR25 for free. You will also need the Framework by Olson (download it free from the SEI). Unfortunately none of these will tell you how to streamline CMM for use by others than major government contractors. The SEI site won't provide it - are we supposed to be smarter than them? CMM is overkill for most organizations but many assessors make us do all of it anyway no matter how small our organisation or different our business needs (different from a LARGE GOVERNMENT CONTRACTOR). Catch 22. If you need a rating you need this book. If you need process improvement then skip CMM completely and do something better.
All the basic factoids of the KPAs and practices are laid out in sequence. But the overall book is poorly organized and adds little value to the rehash of the TRs.
Get the book cause it is needed and for what it does. Try to overlook the value added that could have been included but wasn't.
See also Dymond's book and reviews there. Dymond adds a needed gestalt view for using this book. You could do without Dymond but you shouldn't. This book unfortunately is necessary as there is nothing better that includes the entire CMM except the Framework, which you will need all 900 pages of, to supplement this text. Get all 3 if you want to minimise the time to CMM success.
I would give this zero stars but Amazon doesn't go that low. This book could have really been useful. But as it is, it is the only one that does what it does so we are stuck using it anyway.
If you haven't done CMM yet you may want to consider going straight to CMMI as there are some changes that undo the SW-CMM bookkeeping needed to prove to an assessor that you are compliant. Some of the KPAs carry over as CMMI PAs but some get spread around and put into new PAs. . .
Customer Rating:
Summary: Success or failure, your choice
Comment: Following the guidelines in this book to attain at least repeatable capabilities can make the difference between failing or succeeding. A good example is the failures of one dot com after another during the past year. At one time the term Prestigious Dot Com evoked envy, not it's an oxymoron. Why this happened in a large part is because the cowboy mentality, and to be fair, there were a fair share of "cowgirls" who can take blame, that said we don't need no stinkin' processes. Well, guess they were wrong. What's sad is this book gives a good benchmark set to compare your capabilities and is ignored or badmouthed. What's sadder is the people who scream the loudest about how terrible the CMM is are the ones who cannot speak intelligently about what it's really about. If you want to be an exception and succeed in this competitive environment you own it to yourself to check this book out. Or fail. Your choice.
