SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGY MATURITY MODELS
Mehmet Aksit
University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
Abstract: From enterprise systems to embedded systems, software is the key enabling force of today’s businesses.
Although this fact is recognized by the current business and technology managers, the complexities that
come along with software, and how to deal with these, are hardly understood. This is mostly because
software is “invisible” and the professional skills that are required to deal with complex software are
generally unknown to the management. For this reason, software system development is largely considered
as a bunch of coding activity plus some nasty process management. The businesses that are willing to apply
the maturity models such as CMMI mainly focus on the processes without being conscious about the depth
of the required solution techniques. The increased emphasis on architectures is mostly limited to considering
the enabling technologies in system realization. On the other hand, the language of the researchers in
computer science are unintelligible to the technical managers. We believe that the so called ‘software crisis’
is partly created due to the above listed problems. To address these challenges, we will first identify the so-
called key quality and technology domains. Then we will introduce the concept of technology maturity
models. A technology maturity model identifies the advancements an organization may master in due time
within a key technology domain through adoption of increasingly more advanced and beneficial state-of-
the-art methods, techniques and tools. Finally we will conclude the talk by emphasizing the advantages of
adopting the software technology maturity models for creating successful businesses.
BRIEF BIOGRAPHY
Mehmet Aksit holds an M.Sc. degree from the
Eindhoven University of Technology and a Ph.D.
degree from the University of Twente. Currently, he
is working as a full professor at the Department of
Computer Science, University of Twente and
affiliated with the institute Centre for Telematics and
Information Technology. He has served many
conferences and symposia. For example, he was the
program (co-)chair of ECOOP'97, SACT'00,
HQSAD'00, NoD'02 and AOSD2003. He was the
tutorial chair of the ECOOP'92 conference and the
organizing chair of the AOSD'02 conference. He has
been also serving as a program committee member
of many international conferences and as a reviewer
of several journals. He is the co-founder and has
been the co-editor in chief of Transactions on
Aspect-Oriented Software Development (published
by Springer-Verlag) until March 2007. Currently, he
is at the editorial board of this journal. He has
organized special journal issues as a co-guest editor
on topics such as “Computational Intelligence in
Software Engineering”, “Auto-adaptable Systems”,
“Model Driven Architecture”. In addition, since
1988, he has been serving as a reviewer of various
European projects. He has given numerous invited
presentations and keynote talks. Examples in 2008
are keynote talks in Software Composition
conference in Budapest, Aspect-Oriented Modeling
workshop in Brussels, Informatics conference in
Cesme, Software Quality and Tools Conference in
Istanbul, Sysem Integration Conference in Brasilia.
He is the co-founder of Aspect-oriented association,
where he has served as the steering committee
member until March 2008. He is the steering
committee member of AITO, which organizes the
ECOOP conference series. He is the steering
committee member of the Turkish Software
Architecture Group, which organizes National
conferences on this topic. Since 1990, he has given
more than 110 international and in-company courses
and conference tutorials mainly in the Netherlands,
but also in Canada, Denmark, France, Germany,
Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden,
Switzerland, Turkey and in the United States. For
more than 10 years long, he has received (one of) the
highest evaluations for the courses given for the
post-academic organization (PAO-Informatica). He
has organized special training programs for a
number of multi-national companies, where he
trained hundreds of software designers and
3
Aksit M.
SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGY MATURITY MODELS.
In Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design (BMSD 2011), pages 3-4
ISBN: 978-989-8425-68-3
Copyright
c
 2011 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved

architects. As a visiting scientist, in 1989 he was at
the IBM T. J. Watson Research Laboratory, New
York, in 1993 at the University of Tokyo, and in
1994 at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He
has been involved in the design and implementation
of many software systems. When he was working
for Océ Nederland from 1981 – 1982 and 1983 -
1987, first he worked on image processing and
coding techniques to be used in digital copiers. Later
he worked on office system software. After moving
to the University of Twente in 1987, he has been
involved in many practical projects and designed
various large-scale software architectures, which
some of them are currently being utilized in
products. Some of the research tools developed by
the chair are now being used in some industrial
applications. He has served as a consultant for large
organizations such as in 2006 the Dutch Ministry of
Traffic where he has evaluated large-scale
applications of software systems managing traffic-
flow. Also, in 2007 he has served the Dutch Tax
office by giving consultancy and training.
BMSD 2011 - First International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design
4