CASE tools and method integration

Discusses the Software Process Maturity Model (SPMM). Its notions of process improvement and statistically based control of the main production activities are seen as the base concepts underlying the total quality movement, with its stress on continuing improvement against measured standards of achievement. Unfortunately the central focus of the TQ movement has excluded or been indifferent to many concerns central to the domain of information systems and software engineering, and only recently has this begun to be redressed. The author considers how the SPMM, now in its amended form of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), represents the most sustained attempt to extend the TQ perspective to software-based systems: not a simple task, since the production-based assumptions of TQ do not transfer easily to the processes of information systems and software development