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History Leading to an ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7 Working Group for VSEs developing Systems and/or Software
History Leading to an ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7 Working Group for VSEs Developing Systems
As systems are becoming larger and more complex, the control by large systems engineering organizations of their suppliers, largely composed of small and micro organizations, is critical to the success of their projects.
Small and micro organizations are involved in schemes such extended enterprise, groups of enterprises, participation in innovation platforms. These schemes often induce profound organizational and cultural changes and the adoption of new engineering methodologies.
In 2009, INCOSE (International Council on Systems Engineering) and AFIS (Association Française d'Ingénierie Système) decided to mandate an international Working Group (WG) to address these issues. The goal of the WG is to assist in the application of systems engineering for product development in very small and micro enterprises or small projects.
The WG worked on the following 3 axes:
To continuously collect needs of small businesses and small projects through an online international survey (5 languages).
To develop a set of Systems Engineering standards and guides, using the Generic profile group scheme of the ISO/IEC 29110 series, based on ISO/IEC/IEEE15288 standard and associated guides. The generic profile group is applicable to very small entities (VSEs) that do not develop critical software products. A Very Small Entity (VSE) is an entity (enterprise, organization, department or project) having up to 25 people.
To develop a set of Deployment Packages to facilitate the implementation, by VSEs, of the systems engineering standards and guides such as: Project management, Requirements Engineering, System architecture, Interface management, Integration, verification, validation, Configuration and change management and, Product deployment.
A first document was developed using the Basic profile of the ISO/IEC 29110 series. The Basic Profile describes development of a single application by a single project team with no special risk or situational factors.
Contact Information:
INCOSE: International Council on Systems Engineering: http://www.incose.org
VSE Working Group of INCOSE: vsme-info@incose.org
History Leading to an ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7 Working Group for VSEs Developing Software
The mandate of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7 is the standardization of processes, methods and supporting technologies for the engineering and management of software and systems throughout their life cycles. In this section, a brief history of the events leading to the creation of a new ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7 Working Group (WG), WG24 is presented [1].
At the 2004 SC7 meeting, Canada raised the issue of small enterprises requiring standards adapted to their size and maturity level. The current software engineering standards target (or are perceived as targeting) large organizations. A meeting of interested parties was organized and a consensus was reached on general objectives for a future working group:
To make the current software engineering standards more accessible to VSEs;
To provide documentation requiring minimal tailoring and adaptation effort;
To provide harmonized documentation integrating available standards:
Process standards
Work products and deliverables
Assessment and quality
Modeling and tools
To align profiles, if desirable, with the notions of maturity levels presented in ISO/IEC 15504.
In March 2005, the Thailand Industrial Standards Institute (TISI) invited a Special Working Group (SWG) to advance the work items defined at the Brisbane meeting. A key topic of discussion was to clearly define the size of VSE that the SWG would target, consensus being reached on IT services, organizations and projects with 1 to 25 employees. The major output of this one-week meeting was a draft of the New Work Item (NWI) to be tabled at the next SC7 meeting.
In May 2005, a resolution was approved to distribute for ballot the NWI Proposal for the development of Software Life Cycle Profiles and Guidelines for use in Very Small Enterprises. Twelve countries voted in favor of the NWI Proposal.
As a result of this vote, the Project was approved and the new working group, WG24, was established:
Mr. Tanin Uthayanaka (Thailand) was appointed Convener.
Mr. Claude Y. Laporte (IEEE Computer Society) was appointed Project Editor.
Mr. Jean Bérubé (Canada) was appointed Secretary.
In October 2005, Italy hosted ISO/IEC JTC1 SC7 Interim Meeting. Discussion on the material presented in order to start building consensus leading to the updating of some documents developed in Bangkok and the validation of the project baseline. The New Work Item was updated in order to take into account relevant comments received during balloting, and the requirements were validated by WG members. In addition, some VSE Business Models were identified, as was as a strategy for creating profiles. Finally, WG24 decided to conduct a survey to collect relevant information from VSEs around the world.
WG24 met in Thailand, during the SC7 meeting in May 2006, with two new countries, India and Mexico, sending delegates. The main outputs of the meeting were the following:1. Analysis of the survey responses:
Over 392 responses were collected from 29 countries. An interesting finding of the survey is the difference in the percentage of certified companies with regard to company size: less than 18% of VSEs are certified, while 53% of larger companies (more than 25 employees) claim to be certified. Furthermore, among the 18% not certified, 75% do not use standards.
Over 67% indicated that it was important to be either recognized or certified (e.g. ISO, market);
WG24 decided to prioritize the development of profiles and guides for organizations with 25 people or less. These profiles and guides should also be usable for enterprises, projects and departments of up to 25 people;
2. Evaluation of documents tabled by national delegations;
3. Selection of the Mexican Moprosoft Standard as an input document for the development of standards and guides.
Moprosoft uses ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207 as a general framework. It borrows practices from ISO9001, the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) developed by the Software Engineering Institute, the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) and the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge SWEBOK.
4. Development of standards and guides.
Reference
[1] Laporte, C.Y., Alexandre, S., O’Connor, R., A Software Engineering Lifecycle Standard for Very Small Enterprises, in R.V. O’Connor et al. (Eds.): EuroSPI 2008, CCIS 16, pp. 129–141.
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