By the 1980s, the Department of Defense (DoD) was alarmed enough by the general unreliability of software systems produced for it to create a body that could transfer the most advanced methods of software development worldwide into American practice. In 1984 the DoD chartered the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), whose first moves included employing the key players of the IBM effort and developing analytic procedures to measure the global software process capability of organizations bidding on contracts. The SEI was tasked with using the maturity framework concept to aid the DoD acquisitions process.
Following these initiatives, by 1987 Watts Humphrey had characterized the software development process within a maturity framework and then used that framework as the basis for a questionnaire designed to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of an organization-wide software process . The questionnaire was to be distributed to and completed by representatives from various organization projects prior to the arrival of a team of assessors, who would use the information provided by the questionnaire as the start of discussions with key personnel in the company. The idea was not to rate the company on the basis of the questionnaire but rather to use the information it provided to determine which areas to explore during the assessment proper, which would eventually be conducted according to a method spelled out in a 1989 SEI publication titled "Conducting SEI-Assisted Software Process Assessments" .