Importance of Software Development Standards

Quality Standards

• Standards are essential for effective quality management and can be international, national, organizational, or project-specific.
• Product standards define characteristics that all components should exhibit, such as a common programming style.
• Process standards define how the software process should be enacted.

Importance of Standards

• They encapsulate best practices, avoiding repetition of past mistakes.
• They provide a framework for the quality assurance process, involving checking standard compliance.
• They ensure continuity, enabling new staff to understand the organization by understanding applied standards.

Well-known Quality Standards

• ISO 9000 (International Standards Organization) is an international set of standards for quality management.
• CMM (Capability Maturity Model) was developed by the SEI.

ISO 9000 Standards

• They are applicable to a range of organizations, from manufacturing to service industries.
• ISO 9001:2000 specifies requirements for a quality management system, aiming to enhance customer satisfaction.
• ISO 9004:2000 provides guidance for continual improvement of a quality management system, benefiting all parties.

ISO 9000 Certification

• Quality standards and procedures should be documented in an organizational quality manual.
• An external body may certify that an organization's quality manual conforms to ISO 9000 standards.
• Customers increasingly demand that suppliers are ISO 9000 certified.

ISO 9000 Certification Challenges

• ISO 9000 standards are documentation-based, requiring formal documents for every step of every process.
• Most companies (60-70%) fail the ISO audit the first time, often due to deficiencies in corrective actions and document control.

ISO 9000 and Quality Management

• An organization with SQA tasks in place and a quality management process would have most of ISO elements.
• Ideally, quality management should be separate from project management to ensure quality considerations are not compromised by budget and schedule concerns.

CMM Standard

• CMM is a model for judging the maturity of an organization's software processes and identifying key practices to increase maturity.
• Assessment uses an 85-item questionnaire, and the model consists of 5 levels: Initial, Repeatable, Defined, Managed, and Optimizing.

CMM Levels

• Level 1: Initial - ad hoc and chaotic, with few defined processes.
• Level 2: Repeatable - basic project management processes established to track cost, schedule, and functionality.
• Level 3: Defined - software process for both management and engineering activities are documented, standardized, and integrated.
• Level 4: Managed - process discipline is in place to repeat earlier successes.
• Level 5: Optimizing - continuous improvement of processes.