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US Requirement For Software Dev Certification Raises Questions
dcblogs writes "U.S. government contracts often require bidders to have achieved some level of Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI). CMMI arose some 25 years ago via the backing of the Department of Defense and the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. It operated as a federally funded research and development center until a year ago, when CMMI's product responsibility was shifted to a private, profit-making LLC, the CMMI Institute. The Institute is now owned by Carnegie Mellon. Given that the CMMI Institute is now a self-supporting firm, any requirement that companies be certified by it — and spend the money needed to do so — raises a natural question. 'Why is the government mandating that you support a for-profit company?' said Henry Friedman, the CEO of IR Technologies, a company that develops logistics defense related software and uses CMMI. The value of a certification is subject to debate. To what extent does a CMMI certification determine a successful project outcome? CGI Federal, the lead contractor at Healthcare.gov, is a veritable black belt in software development. In 2012, it achieved the highest possible Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) level for development certification, only the 10th company in the U.S. to do so."
'Why is the government mandating that you support a for-profit company?"
Works for Obamacare.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That CGI "achieved the highest possible Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) level for development certification..." more than proves that the entire model is useless!
In my IT experience, there is one cert that guarantees you meaningful employment no matter what in the US:
H-1B.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydw4An4wlrw#t=12s
CMMI was always SEIs way of trying to reduce programming to bricklaying (only with a lot more paperwork), leaving academics like them as the only real thinking people in the process. It can't work and will never work.
"To what extent does a CMMI certification determine a successful project outcome? CGI Federal, the lead contractor at Healthcare.gov"
Certs are next to useless in determining project outcome, all they do is generate revenue for the lawyers. How many PCI Compliant Credit Card clearing houses have been knocked off - hundreds. For a successfully project what you need is a small core team of top-notch programmers. Apart from getting awarded certs can you name any large-scale projects CGI Federal worked on that could be declared a success by reputable programmers and the end-users.
In 2005, my employer at the time decided to go for CMMI level 3 because it was required by a govt customer for their project. Certification achieved. Then in 2007 my employer opted to shoot for the moon and go for CMMI level 5. Again, certification achieved.
Two years later I left the company, because it was clear that CMMI level 5 was going to kill the company. CMMI level 5 introduced a high level of bloat, inefficiency, process overhead, documentation requirements, and (worst of all) process rigidity and attempts yo manage the development process by statistical analysis. Our delivery times more than doubled. The cost of delivering projects more than tripled. And the Holy Grail of reduced defect density? Nary a sign of such improvement. As far as I could tell, there was -zero- impact on code quality.
Our customers started abandoning us, our reputation circled the bowl, and everyone who had any business sense left the place in droves. What was a $100M/yr contract software development house is now down to 1/4 of the staff and revenue it had in 2009, and I fully expect their parent company will close their doors this year.
I firmly believe that CMMI Level 5 killed that company.
.that you wrote an exam. Nothing else. However, PMI Certification is demanded in so many bloody places for no goddamned reason.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
If you're going to apply to work for the government, and be their subcontractor, it is acceptable to imagine they'll be telling you what to do in exchange for the checks they hand you. That's what the people who write the paychecks do. (In my experience)
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
There is a difference between a mandate to buy something when there are competing suppliers of the product
At least one state has only one Obamacare provider.
Also none of the insurance companies really "compete" because they can't sell insurance across state lines. That's why insurance rates and health care costs are so high, because real competition is not allowed. A small number of players are allowed to control each state (Hello Cable Monopoly).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's absolutely ridiculous that the government requires electricians to be licensed, medical doctors to go to medical school, lawyers to pass an exam demonstrating their competence, engineers to be licensed and have a minimum level of related experience, etc. The free market should be deciding all of these things. The government should stop intervening and do no diligence in lessening the number of its own citizens dying horrific deaths due to the negligence of its own populace. It's absolute socialism for a people's own government to do anything to serve them or do anything to ensure that tax dollars are well spent.
High CMMI maturity levels are really only achievable if you are in the business of mass producing something. They emphasise continuous refinement of production processes, as opposed to research and the development of totally new products. You can write procedures for R&D but they don't allow you to include steps like and then a miracle happens.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Slight difference between mandating e.g. insurance from an insurance company vs insurance from this insurance company.
s/insurance/certification/ if you're still confused.
Meh. There are a few times when certification that are useful--certification for certain contractors makes it more likely they follow certain safety rules, but you can also deal with that just by making inspections common, cheap, and painless. For the most part, certification processes are really about excluding people from local markets--rampant protectionism by people in power. (Like any institution, you become a part of it, gain its advantages, and then it begins to seem hunkey-dorey, if it didn't already. You drink the cool-aid.)
The way the bar works, for example, is much more of an impediment to good representation than it should be. There are some good things it does, like requiring a minimum continuing legal education and making it impossible for some of the people who steal from clients to represent clients. But it also divvies up the market absurdly, on a state-by-state basis, which artificially keeps the price of lawyers higher than it would otherwise be; and it makes their careers much more tenuous than most careers because of the disciplinary system.
Similarly, the way plumbers are licensed divvies up the market absurdly and artificially inflates prices. On the upside, it tends to mean that licensed plumbers at least know how things are supposed to be done and that they have an incentive (keeping their license) to do it the right way. But it costs everyone a fortune.
There's some stuff you could do intelligently on the software side--you could just have a test in a couple of programming languages or concepts to show basic competency--but the idea of requiring a certification with training is nothing short of ridiculous. It's just shooting money to a company that manages the cert process. Seriously, if you want people to not learn a subject, the surest way to do that is to require them to take a class in it. Think about the difference between student participation in optional classes and core classes.
I've worked in the past as part of the DoD Acquisitions Workforce.
CMMI is really just part of a broader obsession in DoD with project and program management. Abstractly, these are good things. When implemented correctly, they make debacles like healthcare.gov nearly impossible. Good planning, budgeting and in-progress evaluation are generally applicable to basic research projects, software development and building ships. We all want to work on projects which are well run.
The problem is, blindly stepping through the predefined process of project management has nothing to do with actually managing a project. You still need good managers who can recognize problems in the technical fields they're working with, understand what to do when problems crop up and are empowered to act. DoD in general fools itself into thinking it has people like this because the paperwork is done right. I suspect that's a fairly common problem.
We all know there's a problem with treating the "talent" (i.e. programmers) as interchangeable blocks using these systems. I think treating management the same way is worse. The ideas that management is mastery of a process and operates solely for organizational interest over individual interest are flawed, but central to things like CMMI.
I really love to watch programming by contract systems fall flat on their face. First they write a huge specification for what a bid will look like. Then in the bid they write a huge specification for the bid which is a bid to write a specification. Then when they start the project they write one last specification that lays out in extreme detail what they are going to build. This is then signed off on and finally they start to build something huge.
But the entire process is not focusing on sorting out the most critical problems, then figuring out the costs to solving them, then picking which problems would be solved. The entire process is all about getting the maximum "buy in" from the "stakeholders" who then lard up the project with any features that pop into their head. A key sign that all this has happened is when the front interface has a message from our leader front and center surrounded by links to all the crap that nobody wants. Buried deeply will be things that most people want and need.
A simple example would be my local schoolboard website. Parents want basic information like enrolling their kids in school, curriculum, and how to contact the school board. Not a single person gives a flying crap about who the schoolboard head is or any opinion she holds; zero. I am willing to bet that the schoolboard spent enough cash building the website to refurbish one of the junky gyms in the school system, or restock a lab, or provide instruments to a music program. Priorities that most people want; not a message from the leader or a bunch of crap about recycling at home.
My schoolboard example is small and a petty source of bad management but typical of even the biggest multi hundred million dollar disaster that you can find governments doing all over the world.
People on slashdot blah blah about opensource which is definitely where governments should be going with all projects but it is to open source the procurement process that would save the massive bucks. If we geeks had a few weeks to look over the various bids and proposals we could feed back some seriously creative and intelligent suggestions. If a project required a room full of servers and switches, an opened design phase would probably result in a huge rewiring/cost cutting/and solid capacity analysis. If proposed interfaces suck then all kinds of suggestions for improvement would flow. If bad software packages were selected then better ones would be proposed.
I live in Argentina, where any software company getting a CMMI certification can apply for a tax cut. Because of that, CMMI was all the rage around eight years ago or so. Turns out CMMI was so utterly useless and cumbersome that at this point most companies prefer to forget about the tax cuts rather than bother with being CMMI certified. Only companies seeking government contracts continue doing so.
I've worked under CMMI level 3-5. Make no mistake it is not cheap in the manpower youll be dedicating to it. It really makes your job difficult process-wise and dull. The fun work will only come infrequently once you get through the process. I wouldn't even thinking of getting the cert unless you project is very mature and the customer requires it.
but we stilled needed some thing.
comcast uses Six Sigma and they have shit hardware that they still reuse even when it's several years old.
This arrangement is a Mafia-type's wet dream - incorporate your proprietary, expensive license or credential into federal standards so that everyone must pay you your protection money.
Yet another dig bites man story. Government requirements often mandate testing and certification by third parties, For example, FCC emissions testings.
End of story.
There is no sense, no reason to it. If you are not prepared to cynical up and drain the public trough to enrich yourself providing no public benefit whatsoever, stay away from federal contracting. Far away. They are quite dangerous to the naively sincere.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Required every white male between 18 and 45 to buy a gun. No ands, ifs, or buts. And to report on a routine basis to their local Militia captain, demonstrate said weapon worked, and conduct training under arms. Oh, and they were registered including what weapon so they knew what regiment/company to assign them to.
Been going on for 200+ years - nothing new.
the government doesn't require you to go out in public
I was under the impression that all fifty states had mandatory school attendance laws.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Immaturity_Model
Reading that made me cry, for the wasted years of my youth.
If you are there, quit now, it's not worth it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I have 30 years IT experience, last 15 as "design lead". Big projects, small projects, lots of programming.
My company bought in IBM on a project, and I was told I was going to be working under a "Certified Master Architect". Great! This was going to be great learning experience, right?
Day 1, in walks this 22 year old kid, freshly graduated. And, by virtue of the fact that IBM corporate had some certification, all their designated architects automatically became "Certified Master Architects".
I worked on that project.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The trouble with the idea of licensing software developers is that no-one really knows yet how to develop software well in general. At most, so far, we have some people who have found practices that worked well on previous projects in their parts of the software development world, and sometimes when the stars align they share their ideas for mutual benefit. This is still a long way short of the standards found in true engineering disciplines.
I suspect the inevitable result of licensing today would be that a lot of consultants who talk a good talk would convince the relevant officials that they knew best, and some sort of dubiously authoritative body would be created to mandate that everyone else should follow the will of the consultants. Imagine a world where Robert C. Martin's claim that if you don't do TDD then you can't possibly be a professional software developer actually carried the force of law.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/12/30/1646227/the-startling-array-of-hacking-tools-in-nsas-armory
US "Requirement"?
This is a joke, right?
You have lost your moral high ground. You are not in a position anymore to demand or require anything from other people or other countries. And this includes certain western european countries as well.
To be clear, the CMMI part of SEI moved over to the CMMI Institute at the end of last year, as the article suggests. Carnegie Mellon University continues to operate SEI as a (not-for-profit) FFRDC. [SEI continues to do a number of other things, including the CERT (www.cert.org)].
It should be noted that a CMMI maturity level designation is not a certification. It may help to have some CMMI appraisal team experience to understand it (I do), but the designation is the result of an organization's self-assessment based on an appraisal model (SCAMPI) developed by SEI/CMMI Institute. When a company claims a certain maturity level, CMMI Institute does not say "we certify this organization (or organizational unit) is CMMI maturity level n." CMMI Institute says "based on our review of the result forwarded by the organization, a result approved by a certified CMMI lead appraiser, we conclude the organization appears to have correctly followed the SCAMPI method and met the standards the organization's appraisal team agrees they did."
An organizational unit is not CMMI-certified by an external certifying authority, it is appraised based on work of a mostly-internal appraisal team (usual exception is the appraisal team leader, a certified individual not employed by the appraised organization in my experience). I don't blame anyone for being confused on the "certification" label... I see it all the time. The title of the /. article itself incorrectly uses the term.
My concern with CMMI is not the procedures and practices themselves, I think they are brilliant if implemented and the organization is resourced to handle it while not tripping up development teams. My concern is in self-assessment, that an inherent conflict of interest exists for the members of an appraisal team employed by the company they are appraising. A company that spends a lot of money preparing for and conducting a valid appraisal it expects a positive result for. But an accredited lead appraiser (again, not an employee of the appraised company in my experience) is not going to keep that distinction for long if they pass through insufficient/bogus appraisals, and that is supposed to be the check on self-assessment risks.
So it isn't the same as PMI, which gives a four hour exam to produce a quantitative, evidenced pass-fail score for a project manager and puts their stamp on a certification that the candidate knows the material with required proficiency and has met other work experience requirements. It is more nuanced and really comes down to how much you trust a given self-assessment.
ISO 90? Light-gauge metal containers!?
http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=23336
... is fully state certified.
Your honor, the prosecution rests.
Trying to find out anything from public sources is pretty tiring, as they start out partisan and get worse. I rather liked this one from Reuters
I don't think there was a real System Integrator on the whole project. The guys at CMS were out of their depth. They had their doubts about the delivery date quite early. But as we all know, the customer manager and the salesmen have the last word on that! Responsibility without power leads to insanity.
The CGI contract was apparently based on the ongoing contract for IT services, based on an older RFP. (The same sort of thing goes on in NYC, for instance. You have to use on of the short list of pre-qualified contractors.) It appears that CGI were responsible for "the website", which to my mind is only part of the project. But integration with the middleware, back end, and inter-system communications is SOMEONE'S responsibility. That is why there is all this finger-pointing.
It appears also that CGI were more or less successful in the smaller implementations by the states that took responsibility. Possibly their management skills were spread too thin. Well, it all seems to be more or less working now, which is a great accomplishment. Thanks to all who participated over many sleepless nights!
Incorrect my good man - you certainly CAN choose not to pay taxes. While you may not like the eventual outcome, you DO have that choice. You can still choose not to get health insurance. You may not like the alternatives very much in the end, but you still have that choice.
And there is now a floor at least for coverage. There are NO preexisting conditions anymore. There are NO charges for routine yearly preventative care physicals. There is a minimum level of coverage now - and as you can see by the thousands of policies terminated, a lot of companies were not meeting that standard (are you really covered if the policy is 'affordable' but doesn't really cover you?).
It may not be perfect, but I think its at least a small step in the right direction.
With all the heat here, and little light, on two separate issues, the risks of the government procurement process, and how law, most law, subsidizes private business and always had, a problem emerges. The privileged position of business special interests is a big historical problem for the U.S. System, and the Right Winger's here running simple interference on the rights of individuals vs. government, are not as forth coming when it comes to business subsidized by government whether it is a contract or the granting of a charter, as to the railroad lands, or aircraft landing rights, or mineral rights in the national commonwealth. There is huge interplay between private economic interest and public policy, and it is business who has greater access to the Congress and for whom Congress passes most of its legislation than do the people. So the Right Wingers here are also the same people who say here over and over again that decisions always boil down to business profitability and they argue here as though there was never any other standard of value.
And so Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act is basically a subsidy to the insurance industry, and does not address the cost side of the health care industry. I see no effort to hold the fees changed by hospitals, clinics, and doctors up to scrutiny, and although the law says that insurers cannot under the law discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, there is no assurance that premiums charged with be affordable. The activity in the exchanges is revealing that the demographic problem that started the cost escalation, young people not buying insurance and spreading the risk for insurers, is not being solved by the mandate in the law. There is a good chance that the law is based on an economic structure that was failing and will continue to fail and that people once more will not be able to get adequate health care. The result is inevatable, either we let people get sick more and die, or we provide socialized medicine in a two tier system in which we have the current system but we do things in the public health sphere and the subsidized medical sector to serve the majority who will become underserved by the current economic model. In a way, this mirrors the more general economic disadvantages emerging in the economy and could be the touchstone for a social revolution in which the selfish Right Wingers, like many of the people who post here will become targets of some sort,
The disadantages of the economy, the concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer and the decline of spending power, job security, for the vast majority of people in the U.S. are having and will continue to have a negative impact on the nation as long as the underlying causes aren't addressed in economic and public policy, and in which the political rhetoric does not create a dialogue and solutions. I blame the cost of energy, the peak of oil, but also the digital revolution for this imbalance. The rise of elites who behave selfishly and act as conservatives have reason to spoil the discussion, as I think that some of them are paid by public relations companies paid for by Republican and Tea Party super PACS to cruise the internet and troll against conversation that may generate solutions and make misleading and simplistic conundrums about individual vs. government, when the real issue is what are the responsibility of being a member of society instead of going to live as a selfish hermit in the wilderness, a rapidly diminishing wilderness at that. There are fewer and fewer places to run and hide and techies, who may be antisocial and avoidant to start with, have a problem if the future is that they have to live with a much higher population density and learn to cope with other people's problems in a compassionate and cooperative way. The Luxery of Rugged Individualism and avoident selfishness, a loaner's mentality, may do for the mountians of Colorado or Alaska, but more and more of us live in cities. This is the lesson of the Gun Control Debate, that an idiot with a firearm in the city is far more dangerous than the same idiot in the wildlands, The standards for living in a city are different from going off by yourself in the country.
Because who would want a company that is managing its development processes or focussed on optimizing them?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Should have thought of that, when you actually had a say.
Non-voter whiners are beyond lame.
That is, unless you can articulate a superior method of picking leadership of a very large group. I'd respect you if you are saying you won't vote until the voting method is improved to e.g. mixed member proportional rep or single-transferable vote. But if you're just one of those "all politicians are the same" non-voters or lazy-ass non-voters, then STFU about politics.
In the current system, if you don't express your opinion on policy at the ballot box, you don't have the right to get your number counted in the political policy opinion statistics.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Without breaking any laws except hunting out of season, lighting a fire in forest-fire-ban season, construction of an unpermitted permanent structure, and mischief and negligence for causing an unnecessary search-and-rescue operation.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?