ISO 9000 or other standards
...delivery and service with both government and private industry clients. It is recognized in developing innovative, state-of-the-art, flexible systems using client-server and Web technologies. While many of the current projects use Oracle, Microsoft and Sybase products, open-systems have been delivered on a wide range of hardware and software platforms too. ‘Proven methodologies and project management discipline help deliver business solutions on time and within budget. In addition to a range of methodologies to cover different technologies and development approaches (eg. Visual Basic vs Java, RAD vs SDLC). However, common to these methodologies is the broad business context of Plan-Build-Support approach’ URL: http://www.dancrai.com.au/about.html (accessed 15th May 2003) The objective of this approach is to ensure a predictable business result from all our projects. Its vision is to respect, trust and serve each other and clients. The mission of Dancrai is to provide outstanding solutions to clients within a highly ethical and nurturing workplace. 2. Discussions / Analysis: ISO 9000 family is a set of internationally recognized standards concerned with "quality management". The standards are intended to provide a generic code of quality system standards applicable to a broad range of industry and economic sectors. This means what the organization does to enhance customer satisfaction by meeting customer and applicable regulatory requirements and continually to improve its performance in this regard. A computer software developer serving a niche market recognized that as their user base expanded they would be faced with issues concerning product management and configuration control. Changes to base products, user hardware and regulatory requirements were compounding customer service issues. ISO 9004:2000 provided the guidance they needed to establish documented procedures to control process change and improvement. ISO 10006:1997 and ISO 10007:1995 provided additional assistance as they managed the project and prepared procedures for configuration management. They later acquired another software developer and were able to use their quality management system to integrate the acquisition into their own structure very quickly with a minimum of disruption to customers. http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/iso900014000/iso9000/selection_use/examplesofiso9000.html Dirk Stelzer, Werner Mellis, Georg Herzwurm University of Cologne, Chair of Business Computing, 50923 Cologne, Germany Software Process Improvement via ISO 9000? Results of two surveys among European software houses Abstract: Much has been said and published about the advantages and disadvantages of the ISO 9000 family for the software industry. However, there is very little empirical evidence to what extent software process improvements have really been achieved via ISO 9000. This paper presents results of two surveys among European software houses. One of the targets of the studies was to find out whether software companies have actually achieved software process improvements via ISO 9000. The first survey was conducted among twenty Germ...