Understanding the difference between ISO 9001 Standards and CMM means recognising a cultural understanding of quality. -Microsoft and many other software companies govern quality with the 80-20 rule,” said David Smith, vice president of Technology Futures, a technology forecasting company in Austin, TX. -The rationale is, ‘it’s a real product if 80 percent of the problem can be addressed and the remaining 20 percent is part of the business model.’ But the reality is the software industry’s business model is not a business model of total quality. And that is part of the challenge when you compare a CMM model against an ISO 9001 Standards model.”
The problem, as Smith sees it, is a conflict between the approaches to quality of ISO 9000 Standards and CMM programs, on the one hand, and the business model that corporations use on the other. -When you’re developing a product, the hardest problems to fix are the last 20 percent,” noted Smith.
Smith highlights three critical elements for understanding ISO 9001 and CMM:
- Understanding and documenting the true requirements is a key element in both standards.
- Document how you write the software code so other people can understand its value.
- Understand the requirements outlined in the program management and business models. It means understanding the maximum payback from the ISO and CMM levels. This is difficult to achieve because it requires both management and supervisory hats.
Software in the original description of ISO 9001 is different from software that runs on a computer, explains Mark Paulk, a senior member of the technical staff at Carnegie Mellon’s SEI.
Paulk’s advice: Understand the essence of ISO 9001 so you can compare it to CMM. ISO 9001’s definition of software is more general and includes music, entertainment, or anything involving the creation of an intangible product.
-But the original bias of the standard was strongly toward the manufacturing environment, where all the historical work had been done,” said Paulk. -And that is one of the criticisms of the early releases of the standards. One of the objectives of the ISO 9000 revisions was it failed to make the standard more comfortable to users in other environments.”
