Yusuf Timol, director: Electrotechnical at the dtis Trade and Investment SA (Tisa), says the aim of the investment is to help make the local software development community more competitive on a global scale.
 
On its international trade missions, Timol says the DTI found that CMMI had become a global standard and has been incorporated into tenders to assist overseas companies in mitigating risk when choosing suppliers.
 
When offering a multi-million dollar tender, companies want to know that the company they award the tender to is capable of completing the project. CMMI provides a benchmark to evaluate suppliers, with most large tenders requiring CMMI level four or five.
 
While a country like India has over 70 CMMI level five companies, SA does not have one as yet, and is lagging a good two to three years behind the rest of the world in this regard, he says.
 
In order to help the local software development industry become competitive on a global scale, the DTI realised that SA had to come into line with international standards, Timol adds.
 
The challenge for local companies in meeting that international standard is that the CMMI process was very expensive as staff members had to be flown overseas to receive training or CMMI consultants had to be flown out to SA.
 
For example, the introductory course to CMMI would cost over R20 000 at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh in the USA, excluding additional travel and accommodation costs.
 
The first step was therefore to make CMMI available locally, which will be done by the JCSE, Timol says. In comparison, the introductory course presented locally by the JCSE costs R7 900 and there are no international travel expenses. Delegates to the local course also receive a SEI certificate on satisfactory completion.
 
Professor Barry Dwolatzky, JCSE Academic Director, says that a pilot CMMI adoption programme is being run with a number of carefully selected local organisations, including Sita, First National Bank (FNB), Psybergate, Wits Universitys Computing Services, IBM and Nedbank. Nedbank itself has provided the JCSE with significant support for the launch of CMMI.
 
The money from the DTI will go towards the training costs of the JCSE staff that will present CMMI training, consulting and assessment services locally. The Introduction to CMMI course is now being run on a monthly basis, he says.
 
The JCSE has to date run two introduction courses which have mostly been attended by employees of the organisations on the CMMI pilot. However, any company interested in getting CMMI accreditation can send its employees on the course, Dwolatzky adds.
 
Now that the companies on the pilot have done the introductory course, the JCSE staff will be assisting them in preparing for a formal CMMI appraisal over the next twelve to eighteen months, which will rate them on one of the five levels of maturity. These appraisals will be carried out by the JCSE using local trainers accredited by the SEI.
 
Once the company feels that it is ready, the JCSE will assess them formally over a period of about a week. They will then receive an official CMMI maturity level accreditation. The good thing about CMMI is that if a company is rated at say level three, the appraisal will also give the company insight into what it needs to do to improve its processes to move up to level four and five, he says.