Agile vs CMMi – A finer understanding

By Administrator 123erty

The Guest Lecture by Mr. Shrikant Chaphekar, Director – Allied Services, Axis Technical Group primarily revolved around the concepts of Agile and CMMi. Mr. Chaphekar started with reflecting on the students’ understanding on CMMi. The lecture was organised on 24th Aug, 2017, for the senior batch students. He emphasised on why is it a mandate in the current days, for organisations to have a CMMi accreditation. Over time, CMMi has evolved to be a de facto standard – something that’s a pre-requisite to be in the business and for client engagements. The evolution of CMMi is often attributed to the dominance of maintenance and support projects over development, in IT.

The industry is on the move towards Agile, for a long time now. The speaker analysed this movement, in the backdrop of limitations of the traditional waterfall model. He quoted Gartner reports that suggests that over 5ooo projects in every 10000 projects developed using Waterfall model, are not used by the customers. The time to market is too huge that by the time it reaches the customers, the product or the service developed becomes obsolete. Mr. Chaphekar highlighted that the shorter delivery timelines and higher quality assurance make Agile a viable alternative to Waterfall model.

Further, the speaker discussed the concept of Agile SCRUM and the various terminologies used in Agile software development. He elaborated on terms like sprint, daily scrum, product backlog, iteration backlog, etc., that give out a broad overview of the entire development lifecycle. He introduced the concept of DevOps on the go, and made an impressive statement, “Where Agile ends, DevOps begins!”.

Mr. Chaphekar had an interesting take on blending of Agile and CMMi. Agile, being a software development methodology and CMMi, being a process improvement framework, is a promising mix. Blending CMMi and Agile would give us perspectives on ‘What to do?’ (via CMMi) and ‘How to do?’ (via Agile). The session lead to a fruitful assimilation of the new thoughts and knowledge shared. The students’ eagerly look forward to such informative sessions.