In the intense international competition software companies are more and more forced to think about proving their capability of delivering good products. One way of having such a proof is to obtain an official certificate about usage of a certain standard or model. However, introducing a quality approach based on a standard or model, and institutionalising it, so that the organisation is able to pass an audit, requires a lot of investment from the software companies, both in terms of money and effort – which a company would not like to waste. Therefore, really business-driven software companies will be willing to do only really efficient software process improvement.
Efficient improvement programs are always based on real needs of companies and will always start from understanding the actual situation of that company. Choosing the right approach, model or standard for the improvement program would be the next step.
The difficult question is: which model to choose to best fit the company’s needs in improving software quality? What activities to execute and in which sequence in order to transform the initial – probably almost chaotic – situation, step by step,  into some controllable and provable “order”?

The QMIM (Quality through Managed Improvement and Measurement) framework was developed to help companies in such situation.

The QMIM Framework