Curious - Are there many Software Developers who visit this forum?

[Sleepless]

I'm curious to know if there are many other software developers on this forum. I know there are a lot of manufacturing related individuals here but not sure of how many software people are interested in ISO certification. If so, what kind of software do you make?

FYI -
My company creates aerospace software.
My previous company created manufacturing process optimization software (statistical tool sets).

[Marc]

I don't think there are, but I'm interested as well.

[Peter Fraser]

Originally Posted by Sleepless

I'm curious to know if there are many other software developers on this forum. I know there are a lot of manufacturing related individuals here but not sure of how many software people are interested in ISO certification. If so, what kind of software do you make?

FYI -
My company creates aerospace software.
My previous company created manufacturing process optimization software (statistical tool sets).

I suppose that we qualify, but not so much as an organisation interested in formal certification against ISO9001 for our own operations. I am also a consultant, and I am more interested in how end-users approach the whole subject of business management systems and process management (which is what our software is designed for). As has been stated many times by others in this forum, certification (against any relevant standard) should only follow after an organisation has defined how it operates and is managed. [I was asked to contribute an article to TickIT International a couple of years ago, so someone must think that our approach has some merit!]

As you say, there seem to be a lot of automotive and aerospace people around - one of the problems I continually find is that folk in service industries find the wording of ISO9001:2000 far too much from the "continous production line" way of thinking.

It would also be interesting to find out if folk believe (or have experience to show) that a software company with ISO9001 is likely to provide a better product and service than one which isn't certified.

[Steve Prevette]

Originally Posted by Sleepless

I'm curious to know if there are many other software developers on this forum. I know there are a lot of manufacturing related individuals here but not sure of how many software people are interested in ISO certification. If so, what kind of software do you make?

FYI -
My company creates aerospace software.
My previous company created manufacturing process optimization software (statistical tool sets).

To a certain extent I am a software developer, but only for as a single person (and a backup or two) project. I currently write in Visual Basic in order to access various production databases on site through ODBC, set up "flat files" (one line per entry to be counted, even if this duplicates information from line to line) and then counts the number of entries by time interval. Once the initial flat file is set up, the program is object driven. You specify the name of the table to be counted, its directory, and the output table, then the field to be counted and any filtering information. The output is to Access tables and to text reports.

No, I am not interested in ISO.

[Sleepless]

My two cents based on my own experience (sorry for the wordiness of it):

I've worked for organizations that were not ISO 9001 certified and ones that became ISO 9001 certified after I was there for a few years. One company didn't really need it, they were organized and there were no regulations that required cert. Another company, I was at, REALLY needed it. I think the interesting thing was that becoming ISO 9001 certified made the company become more cohesive with their development planning and releases, which made future planning easier. Where previously, they created software products that would stand alone and used whatever technology the architects were familiar with. The post-certified products, were more standardized and uniform. This provided consistency, which is always good for the user since it reduces their need to re-learn with every new product.

All that being said, I still believe that there are economy's of scale and that the gains of anything, like ISO 9001, have a limit. As we began to add more products to a common product suite (one that had a single install, a single security system, and a single database tool), we found that each product had it's own set of dependencies which affected the other products in the suite. Sometimes this caused decisions on supported technology for one product to be dictated by another product. Rather than using the best solution for the one product, we had to think in terms of the best solution for the entire product set (even though each product had a slightly different set of users with different sets of needs).

[stanislavd]

I work for software development company. We are ISO certified since 2004. Based on my experience, most of the firms that have implemented quality management system (even if not certified) benefit a lot. The main conditions - well designed, effective, *light and user friendly* system. Yes it is hard to achieve at the start, but with good management the evolution and the continuous improvement becomes not only buzz words.

[jrubio]

I create VBA applications, and VBA in Excel.

Cheers.

[e-solver]

I have developed e-solver and are actually scoping the development of a web based ISO assessment programme. It will cover every aspect of ISO certification. People may get benefit from implementin of aspects in a real sense of the wod, but people get ISO certification for more reasons than their own process documentation and possible improvement. For example, some European company's require certain ISO certification to be considered as suppliers to them and so on.