Software Quality Assurance

Chapter 4 Software Engineering Standards and Models

After completing this chapter, you will be able to:

• – understand the evolution and the importance of software engineering standards for the SQA specialist;
• – understand the standards for software quality management systems: ISO 9001, ISO/IEC 90003, ISO/IEC 20000, and the TickIT certification process [TIK 07];
• – understand the software engineering standards: ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207 and IEEE 730 that govern the content of the SQA plan;
• – include other improvement models, norms, standards, and quality processes: CMMI^® maturity models of software processes and S^3m, ITIL, the CobiT IT governance approach, the ISO/IEC 27000 information security standard, and the ISO/IEC 29110 standards for very small organizations;
• – understand that there are also repositories and standards specific to certain application domains: DO-178 and ED-12 for aeronautics, EN 50128 for railways and ISO 13485 for the field of medical devices that contain software;
• – understand the importance of standards in terms of SQA.

4.1 Introduction

Other engineering domains such as mechanical, chemical, electrical, or physics engineering are based on the laws of nature as discovered by scientists. Figure 4.1 illustrates some of the many laws of nature.

Figure 4.1 A few laws of nature used by some engineering disciplines.

Unfortunately, software engineering, unlike ...