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An ISO 9001:2000 Certificate and Quality Awards from Outside – What’s Inside? – A Case Study

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Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 4034))

Abstract

In order to survive in a strong competition software houses need to design high-quality software. To achieve this some companies try to certify their software development processes in accordance with well-known industrial standards. Through a case study we investigated what characterizes the use of a quality system among developers and project managers in a large software company that has successfully achieved an ISO 9001:2000 certification. We found that certification not always indicates that the company successfully uses the practices in accordance with quality standards. This caused serious problems, such as projects that follow outdated practices, project managers faking quality documentation before audits, resources wasted by producing documents no one needs, problems created for new employees since they cannot find descriptions of the processes people are working in accordance with, and an expensive system no one uses.

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Šmite, D., Moe, N.B. (2006). An ISO 9001:2000 Certificate and Quality Awards from Outside – What’s Inside? – A Case Study. In: Münch, J., Vierimaa, M. (eds) Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4034. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11767718_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11767718_19

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-34682-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-34683-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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