Mr. Warner said the software industry needs to move toward the quality of other industry products, whereby software organizations will provide guarantees to their customers that their products will be defect-free for 25 years or they fix problems for free. He pointed out that the software industry is slow to mature. The 777 contains four million source lines of code, the software systems are all functional, and the 777 is service ready and on schedule. Her major premise was that the most successful software organizations are those organizations that institutionalize learning. Technology shelf life is now five years, that change is constant, to remain competitive we must engage in professional development activities.
Professional development is the process of continuing education for all employees.
This was a continuation of a debate that first began in the September 1994 issue of American Programmer magazine. Mr. Curtis, who suppoprted the CMM, stated the CMM is Total Quality Management-based, which results in repeatability and discipline from organizations that employ CMM, and the empirical data supports the CMM approach. Mr. Bach contends that the CMM is a step backward, and criticizes the CMM because he believes there is no formal theoretical basis to the CMM, vague empirical data supports the CMM, the CMM ignores people, and institutionalizing the CMM reduces software professionals' creativity. Figure 1 graphically depicts the process maturity path for 47 organizations that have been reassessed at least once. The presenters stated that the average time for organizations to move up one maturity level was 18-30 months.