Are we closer to the end of the “CMMI vs Agile” discussion?

During the last years a recurring topic of discussion was if CMMI and Agile were not like oil and water. Many people consider that both have things to learn from the other and in many cases they could complement each other being followed together.
An interesting signal of the possibility of embracing both at the same time came up recently.

The SEI has released this month the “CMMI for Development” document in its Version 1.3. The version 1.2 was released con 2006 and among the significant improvements I will focus on the following: “Informative material was improved, including revising the engineering practices to reflect industry best practice and adding guidance for organizations that use Agile methods. “
This document, which can be downloaded from here has a new section called “Interpreting CMMI When Using Agile Approaches”. This section gives details about the changes done including notes with the words “In Agile environments”, with examples of how to interpret practices. Also use the following characteristics to describe agile approaches:

• Direct involvement of the customer in product development
• Use of multiple development iterations to learn about and evolve the product
• Customer willingness to share in the responsibility for decisions and risk

As an example of these notes we have in the configuration management section: “In Agile environments, configuration management (CM) is important because of the need to support frequent change, frequent builds (typically daily), multiple baselines, and multiple CM supported workspaces (e.g., for individuals, teams, and even for pair-programming). Agile teams may get bogged down if the organization doesn’t: 1) automate CM (e.g., build scripts, status accounting, integrity checking) and 2) implement CM as a single set of standard services.”

In the “Product integration” section we will find:
“In Agile environments, product integration is a frequent, often daily, activity. For example, for software, working code is continuously added to the code base in a process called continuous integration.”

As these there are more than ten notes with clarifications with regard to Agile environments with clear explanations about aspects to be considered when making evaluations.

This significant step is not surprising, as the SEI released the document “CMMI or Agile: Why Not Embrace Both”  on 2008, but it is undoubtedly a considerable step.

Nota: En inglés ya que fue escrito para el sitio de TCM @Knowmax