I am indeed a brat :-) (well figuratively at least) . The first project in Scotland was for a financial system (it was owned by a fairly big financial service company). There was already a system in place - for treasury/bond/etc management. The system was working fairy well. Got a new CIO, who had heard all sort of buzz things. There was a fair bit of pretty involved C (not C++) code and a homegrown domain specific language compiler (for the rule based inference engine) which did all sort of fancy calculations. The CIO insisted that the process be improved. We had a bunch of consultants brought in from a big name consultancy company and they managed to convince the management that the whole system needed a overhaul. We had a fairly mature process in place with extremely disciplined programmers, - bug tracking system, source control system, nightly automated builds/testing/automatic code analysis/testing, peer reviews, bug triage, quality gate checkpoints - we had the whole nine yards. As far as we could determine we were already at CMM level 3 (at least 2). The consultants decide that this was not good enough. They ripped apart the whole system, installed new systems for bug tracking/source control (we lost our code revision history/bug tracking history going back 15 years + , we had to use two distinct set of systems) - and decided on an onerous set of procedures (layers upon layers). Productivity/staff morale plummeted and the bug turn around time increased. They also decided that development system needed overhaul (the homegrown DSL compiler was abandoned and the rules engine was written in C++). It was a complete nightmare. I left soon after the project was implemented, but last I heard, the CIO was being let go and they were in the process of simplifying the whole process again and were going back to the old rule based engine. Several people had already left. It was a complete chaos. The second implementation was much better. It was in a development house in Ireland which was developing avionics software. We were already meeting with FAA standards (which if you look at it is in a way much more stringent than the requirements for CMMI) which require strict control of development environment, and we were developing in Ada (a great language if I might add). We brought just two consultants (independent ones - not from big consultancy houses) and two university professors (one CS/one Project Management). The extra paperwork required was not a significant addon to the process management system required for FAA compliance. It was basically a cakewalk. So unless you really need CMMI, and you do have a real mature process in place, there is as far as I can see, no need exactly go for it. Also CMMI doesn't really mean that your bug count or bug turnaround time will go down. Improperly implemented, it can really f**k up the system. And keep clear of big consultancy houses (you will definitely need to bring in the consulants). cheers Brat