Research On CMMI-based Software Development Project Management

China’s software industry has enjoyed fast development for the past decade, moreover, it’s foreseeable there is a bright future for this industry in China. Whereas, there are some problems within this industry that should not be ignored, one of which is the poor management of software development projects. To some extent, this setback hinders the further development of China’s software industry. To maintain a fast development trend, China’s software industry needs to improve its management of software development projects.Software development projects have their own features, these features cause the management of software development projects is not easy, and there is great difference between software development projects and traditional ones, so is the management method between them. Therefore, many universal theories or methods of project management are not applicable to the management of software development projects. CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) is a model widely acknowledged and highly praised within global software industry nowadays. The CMMI model is a set of process management theory, its core management idea is "good process produces good results, poor process produces poor results", specifically, through effective control of the process of software development, software vendors can deliver products on time, within budget and with high quality. The CMMI model has been used by a number of software vendors in global, it was proved a practical and effective management theory of software development projects, so using CMMI in the management of the software development projects of our country will help to improve the software development project management level. However, CMMI is just a framework theory, It only tells us what we should do, rather than exactly how we do. Therefore, we cannot apply it directly. It requires us to extend its specific management approaches in accordance with the features of a specific organization and project, and the process should be guided by the framework of CMMI. This article mainly study a management approach of software development project based on the framework of CMMI, so as to make it applicable for general software enterprise and software development project.The first chapter of this article is an introduction, introducing the background and significance of the topic of this article, application status of the CMMI at domestic and broad, idea, content, and approach of the study in this article and also the structure of this paper. Second chapter is a general description of the management of software development projects, including introducing the management of software development projects, the life circle of software and its models, analyzing the features of software development projects and main difficulties of the management of software development projects, studying existing problems of the management of software development projects, analyzing and comparing major approaches of current management of software development projects. The third chapter comes up with a specific management approach of software development projects based on CMMI framework, firstly introducing CMMI model, then briefly introducing management approaches based on CMMI, then research how to set up a management system of software development projects, lastly elaborating specific practice in key areas such as requirement management, process management, risk management, quality management, configuration management, and measurement. The fourth chapter is Empirical research, it adopts a real project case and specific practice of Corporate A which the writer is with to verify and study.