Rex van Olst, JCSE chief executive, says Prof Barry Dwolatzky, JCSE Academic Director, and Estelle Trengove, a lecturer at the School of Electrical and Information Engineering at Wits, recently returned from London after completing the five day CMMI intermediate concepts course.

The course and the exam were very challenging but we both made it through, says Dwolatzky. All that remains is an instructor course, which we hope to do in September.

The instructor course will enable Dwolatzky and Trengove to present the Introduction to CMMI course locally. This course is officially accredited by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), which is situated at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in the USA. Dwolatzky and Trengove attended this course in January this year.

Van Olst says the JCSE was recently made the first official partner in Africa of the SEI, which developed the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) model to help companies from a host of sectors to improve their business software development processes.

Once Dwolatzky and Trengove receive their instructor status, the JCSE will begin with its programme to bring CMMI certification to SA using local trainers, consultants and appraisers.

This programme will involve the CMMI certification of five companies, beginning with the introductory course. As the project progresses, the JCSE will feedback the results of the project to the SEI, which will be comparing results from various projects being conducted around the world, Van Olst says.

Our aim is to drop the cost of CMMI in SA as low as possible, so that all local companies can benefit from improved processes. We believe CMMI could play a critical role in providing a measurable standard for international companies looking to outsource their software development needs to local companies, he adds.