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This article provides a brief introduction to the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) that aims to cover most of the ground, if at a fairly shallow depth. The CMMI is a process-based model that sketches out a comprehensive picture of development. It builds on that to define a method for developing organization standard processes and for keeping them relevant. Those processes are leveraged to ultimately deploy statistical process control to improve organizational performance. The model is supported by a standard method for assessing an organization, SCAMPI appraisals. My hope is that after reading this article, the reader will be able to make an informed decision on whether or not digging into the CMMI further is warranted. Note that the notion of the "organization" in the CMMI allows for smaller groups within a company to be the focus of CMMI-based process improvement - so you don't have to wait for your whole company to get on board to get started.

Cakewalk has been reprogramming PCs into music studios since the days of DOS. Today, CTO Noel Borthwick explained the deep, technical details of how the architectural changes in Windows 7 will help (and sometimes hinder) audio processing.

At the Agile 2009 conference, Abby Fichtner and Nate Oster are doing a workshop called Where Does Developer Testing End and Tester Testing Begin? Jenny and I hope you can make it, because they'll be doing a giveaway of autographed copies of our latest book, Beautiful Teams: Inspiring and Cautionary Tales from Veteran Team Leaders. It's a collection of essays by and interviews with some of the industry's biggest thinkers. There's one interview that I think is definitely relevant here, and I want to share a bit of it with you. In our interview with Scott Ambler, he neatly encapsulates the sort of resistance that a lot of good programmers have to new, untested (to them) practices.

Peter Kirn of Create Digital Music posted this terrific graph yesterday, showing that the more appealing the promised product, the longer it will take to ship: The object of Peter's gear lust was the Teenage Engineering (even the company name...

The Python core developers released Python 3.0 in December 2008, following closely behind Python 2.6. Python creator Guido van Rossum generously agreed to discuss the present and future of the popular programming language, as well as the history of the Python 3.0 revision.

Programming language features and tools are obvious force multipliers for software developers. Development practices are less obvious. Here are some of my favorite productivity improvements.

Perl is 21 years old and Perl 5 is 14 years old. The language has aged well, but there's room to improve. Here are five features which make hard things easy and difficult things possible.

Good programmers tend to be polyglot programmers. I'm not sure that good applications tend to be polyglot applications; perhaps the way we build Internet applications is hazardous in the long term.

Greg-Kroah Hartman discusses why he believes the Linux kernel supports more devices than any other operating system ever has, why binary-only drivers are impractical, immoral, and illegal, and how the kernel development process contributes to the inevitable world domination of free software.