Examples of exploratory questions for specific technical groups (all related to some level of the CMM/CMMI) are provided in the following charts.
It is important to ask appropriate questions to the people who are most familiar with the topic and who are therefore most likely to provide the assessment team with valuable information. Here, for example, are some typical questions the team might ask different jobholders about specific process areas.
Requirements Management and Requirements Development Process Areas
To Requirements Managers and Staff:
- How were you trained to do your job?
- How do you work with the customer or user to develop requirements?
- How do you keep track of requirements?
To Project Managers:
- How do you receive your project requirements?
- What is the project’s process for understanding requirements?
- Who on the project helps develop the requirements?
- Who on the project reviews the requirements?
- How do you handle changes to requirements?
- What happens when developers find that the requirements they are trying to implement do not make sense?
To Implementers:
- What do you do to analyze the requirements for your project?
- If the customer asks you to change something during a demo, what do you do?
- How do you know how the users and/or customer will use the system?
Project Planning Process Area
To Project Managers:
- After the project gets funded, how much freedom do you have to alter what was done by the proposal team?
How does the project estimate:
Product size
Resources (person hours and/or cost)
Schedule
How do you decide which project measurements should be collected?
How do you decide what project data (monthly reports, WBS, minute meetings, etc.) will be under configuration management?
To Implementers:
- What is your role in estimating the size of the product?
- How do you determine whether your part of the implemented software satisfies the plan?
- How do you estimate how long and how much effort your particular piece of the job will take? Can you walk us through a recent example?
To Configuration Management Practitioners: - How do you plan your part (configuration management) of the project?
To Quality Assurance Practitioners:
- How do you plan what you will do on the projects?
- Can you explain what happens if a project team says it has too little money to perform quality assurance.
Organizational Process Definition (ML 3) and Integrated Project Management (ML3) Process Areas
To Project Managers:
- What role did you play in helping to develop the organization’s management and engineering handbooks?
- How do you refine the processes (both management and engineering) for your project?
To Implementers:
What role did you have in developing the engineering processes for the organization (i.e., the engineering handbook)?
To Members of the Process Improvement Group:
How were the organization’s management and engineering processes developed?
How do project teams know what processes they must follow on their project?
What criteria did you use to select the best documents, templates, and so on from projects?
How does the organization collect measurements from the projects?
To the CM Staff:
Where do you find the configuration management processes you use on projects?
To the QA Staff:
Where do you find the quality assurance processes you use on projects?
Quantitative Project Management (ML 4) Process Area
To Project Managers:
How did you select the critical processes to be quantitatively managed (or put under statistical process control) on your project?
How often do you review control charts? What information are you getting from them that you didn’t get before?
To Implementers:
What role do you play in analyzing the control charts?
How often do you review the charts?
To Configuration Management Practitioners:
What role do you play in analyzing the control charts used on projects?
To Quality Assurance Practitioners:
Do quality assurance people use statistical process control (e.g., control charts, Pareto diagrams) to understand how they can improve their performance?
Middle and senior managers are not ordinarily asked PA-specific questions, but it might be useful to ask them general questions, such as the following:
To Middle and Senior Managers:
- What project measurement data do you regularly require from project managers?
- Can you tell us what particular measures give you an early warning that a project is heading for trouble? Specifically, can you name some leading indicators instead of lagging indicators, such as cost? Can you give us a recent example?
- What is your role in process improvement?
- What areas would you like to improve in the next year? Why?
- Have you benefited, if at all, from the statistical process control charts and predictive models now used on the projects?