The true outcome of a maturity model assessment isn't what level you are but the list of things you need to work on to improve.

(Martin Fowler, https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/MaturityModel.html)

Objectives

Maturity models are instruments for organisational improvement and evaluation. GÉANT Software Governance and Support is iteratively developing the GÉANT Software Maturity Model (SMM) to

• support the identification of needs, trends and important aspects of software engineering,
• capture best practices, promote self-improvement and contribute to the quality of software development and governance.

The main purpose of the SMM is not the assessment, but to give pointers to best practices GÉANT software teams might be missing, which requires to establish a good evaluation scale and analytical apparatus. The idea is to "borrow" know-how and present what other teams operating comparable environments do and achieve.

Specifically, GÉANT Software Maturity Model aims to:

• Identify needs and capture relevant software engineering aspects relevant for GÉANT software projects and developments.
• Accommodate the prior work in GÉANT and identify existing good practices, assess their wider applicability, prepare them for a wider adoption, and promote and support the best common practices.
• Facilitate co-ordination between teams and their self-improvement.
• Support software teams, assisting them in change of practices and quality enhancements.
• Outline a general framework for iterative development and enhancement of software engineering.

SMM overview

Target areas

SMM focuses on five target areas (TAs) that have been found to be essential for successful software development, addressing also the GÉANT specifics. Further, each TA includes several specific goals (SGs), which are individual concerns within them.

• Requirements engineering

• Design and implementation

• Quality assurance

• Team organisation

• Software maintenance