Abstract

A model of software development process maturity, the Capability Maturity Model for Software (SW-CMM) is a staged evolutionary model which describes five levels of process maturity through which an organization can progress to define, assess, and improve its software development processes. Despite its ever-increasing adoption, there remain too few empirical and generalizable findings when it comes to key questions regarding the model's adoption. Researchers and practitioners are still struggling to determine how CMM-based process improvement efforts affect key organizational concerns such as software project performance and in turn how the performance of software projects is affected by the threat of risks in today's dynamic and complex business environment. In addressing this knowledge gap, this study proposes a research model which is grounded in prior research and that will allow for a first known empirical examination of the relationships between CMM process maturity levels and the performance of software development projects while assessing the impact of software development risk on performance. Two hypotheses were derived from the model for empirical testing. Data was collected from 107 organizations that were officially appraised at a given CMM maturity level. Results using PLS provide considerable support for the hypotheses. As expected, CMM software development process maturity levels have a direct and significant impact of the performance of software development projects. Furthermore, evidence of the negative and significant influence of software development risk on software project performance was also found. Discussions on the potential for future research and implications for practice are also presented.