Software Quality System In A Small Software House

Abstract

The characteristics of a small software house and implementation of ISO 9001 standard in its environment are represented and discussed. Basic thesis, that there is a real need for national or international minimal requirements or levelled requirements for harmonization with ISO 9001 is rejected. In extreme circumstances (few man software house) or for special software products, product standards seem to be more usable than software process standards. 1.DEFINITION OF THE PROBLEM The software maturity model by SEI (Humpreyl) anticipates the development environment to be developed from the first, initial level to the fifth, optimized one. The software maturity process from one level to the next one requires a corresponding project organization and management, a well defined and managed process and the software metrics and decision making based on the process data, recources and software products. All the afore stated requires a corresponding level of administration and a certain bureaucracy. Software quality standards such as ISO 9000-3 guidelines (ISO 9000-32) and IEEE standards presume the management to understand the requirements, and the extent of bureaucracy to be subordinated to minimal management requirements. Because of incorrect understanding of the standard requirements the bureacracy might become economically questionable, if not already unjustified. Efficient economical implementation of the standard requirements and the software maturity model is a especially burning problem in small software houses. The problem discussed in this paper is the question, how to introduce the quality system into a small software house in an economical and efficient way. Transactions on Information and Communications Technologies vol 11, © 1995 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3517