Relevant Standards

Several international standardization bodies exist providing standards and guidelines which can be considered of importance from the point of view of software product quality. The most important ones are:

	the International Organization for Standardization (ISO),
	the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and
	the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).

Other organizations providing standards related to software quality are government bodies, such as United States Department of Defense (DOD) and industry sector societies for specific application areas (i.e. medical devices, aerospace, power plants, chemical plants, ...)

Standards can be of considerable assistance to software developers, maintainers, users, acquirers and evaluators. Their use can provide a common vocabulary and a common framework to the benefit of all parties.

Standards are not a substitute for good practices in software design and implementation, but they can help in improving software product quality.

The benefits of international standards related to software, and particularly to software quality, include:

• a common terminology and definitions set,
• reduced costs for contract definition and software development, as a set of activities and their outputs are known and agreed by both acquirers and suppliers,
• reduced costs and increased recognition of results for software product evaluations based on a known software quality model,
• methods, procedures and tools usable across different projects and subject domains.

An overview of a selected list of standards related to software quality is presented.