Lean CMMI - My Presentation at Agile2015!

First and foremost, I'm so grateful and thankful to Allah (swt) for helping me getting through this research paper. Not only that, I got it accepted in the Agile Conference 2015; the biggest Agile conference in the world.

I have published several papers before, but they were all industrial reports. Industrial reports (aka experience reports) document useful experiments done in the industry. As opposed to research papers, industrial reports do not necessarily use a scientific method to prove something.

My personal opinion, Industrial Reports are very useful, and probably more valuable than research paper. They reflect real experience and one can draw benefit from it right away. So, if your audience are software practitioners, then research papers are not the right means to communicate your experience to them :)

If this is the case, why did I write a paper? Two reasons:

1. The first reason is that I had data! and found it interesting to experiment writing a paper.
2. The second reason is to write a proof that incremental approaches in process improvement is better that holistic approaches. 

Here is a link to the abstract of the paper: Lean CMMI: An Iterative and Incremental Approach to CMMI-Based Process Improvement.

In this paper, I'm comparing results of process improvement in Configuration Management process area of CMMI. The first group of results are based on traditional process improvement effort (one process area at a time). The second group of results are based on the 'Process Increments' method, an iterative and incremental approach for software process improvement. This model divides improvements into small chunks as in the following model:

These Process Increments are dynamic. You can add, remove, re-prioritize them as needed. It's like user stories in software projects.

The results of the study are in the following diagram. It's a box plot of SP ratings in semi-formal CMMI appraisals. As you see, the ratings in the second group of companies are much higher than ratings in the first group of companies. is as follows:

Those who knows six sigma or has experience in research would know that these results are real proof that iterative and incremental methods works better!