Test software at Texas Instruments: what SEI level is appropriate?

In 1989, Texas Instruments (TI) as a corporation embarked on an aggressive mission to improve the quality of its internally developed software. As a part of this ongoing effort, the Test Engineering Department of the Defense Systems and Electronics Group (DSEG) evaluated existing test software development practices and procedures. Using the Software Engineering Institute´s (SEI) Capability Maturity Model (CMM) to measure software process quality, DSEG Test Engineering Department was internally appraised at SEI Level 2 and is currently working towards Level 3. There were unique challenges and difficulties relative to this achievement due to the wide diversity of test types, development standards, languages and platforms associated with test software. This paper presents the approach, schedule, lessons learned and some of the benefits which resulted from the efforts of the DSEG Test Engineering software quality thrust.