posted 25 January 2000 04:10 AM               

From: Daniel Dresner

With the upcoming revision of the ISO 9000 series of standards due at the end of 2000, consideration has been given to what will happen to all the other documents in the family.

The ISO committee responsible for the ISO 9000 family is ISO/TC 176. The focus of the work of ISO/TC 176 has been on "core" standards ISO 9000, ISO 9001, ISO 9004 and ISO 19011.

The intention of ISO/TC 176 is that the revised ISO 9001:2000 will be sufficiently generic and easy to understand that guidance will not be required. The original proposal was that all existing guidance documents will be withdrawn.

However, there has been some concern that sector-specific guidance will be required; of particular concern to software engineers is the fate of ISO 9000-3:1997. The current proposal is that the ownership of ISO 9000-3 is transferred to the ISO committee JTC/1 and the section of the British Standard Institution (BSI) committee IST/15 specialising in Software Engineering. BSI through its DISC division has managed the TickIT scheme (http://www.tickit.org). TickIT guides software developers to define and implement a quality system which covers all the essential business processes in the product life cycle within the framework of ISO 9000.

The BSI DISC committee BRD/3/1 (responsible for The TickIT Guide) believes that the ownership of the document is not of primary concern, but that it is important that it is retained and revised in line with ISO 9001:2000.

BRD/3/1 would appreciate input from users of ISO 9000-3 :1997 on the following:

1) Do you think that ISO 9000-3 should be retained or withdrawn? 2) Do you think that it should be revised in line with ISO 9001:2000? 3) Any other comments.

Please send your feedback from this via e-mail to daniel.dresner@ncc.co.uk who will forward it to the committee representative.

For reference here is the pertinent extract from the journal TickIT International 4Q99 article by Andy Coster Quality Manager of Oracle, Chairman, BSI-DISC Committee IST/15.

'Interaction with ISO 9001:2000 is also key to the success of any emerging standards in this area; speaking of which, the UK group that helped to develop ISO 9000-3:1997 have proposed that new guidance for software development organizations should be developed. They have produced a draft for a new version of ISO 9000-3 based on the CD2 version of ISO 9001:2000 that has just completed ballot. There is some hostility to this approach in the software community, where expectations had been raised that the new ISO 9001:2000 would cater for software as well as hardware, services and process industry. The reality is that, although the new standard is much improved and increased in length, it is still difficult to interpret for software development and software engineering. Verification, Validation and Configuration Management are all glossed over in CD2. Some form of additional guidance for software is definitely required but it remains to be seen whether this will be a guidelines standard, a technical report or even specific guidance developed as part of the revision to the TickIT guide. Moreover, it's still not clear who will be developing these guidelines.'

(The complete article is at: http://www.tickit.org/ti4q99.pdf)

Looking forward to hearing from you