61 SOFTWARE QUALITY MANAGEMENT THROUGH IMPLEMENTATION OF SOFTWARE STANDARDS

Abstract: Many of the tools of Quality Management are based around the concept of a "process". The simplest example is a manufacturing production line. Nonmanufacturing companies can also be seen as collection of different processes. A software development company has its software development process with user requirements on the one end and the finished software product on the other. As the manufacturing industries have to comply with certain production standards, the large software companies and government agencies are increasingly using Quality Assurance (QA) Certification as their basic strategy for managing competition and supplier relationships. The key factor is "reliability". It is assurance that the quality achieved today can be supplied well into the future. The reliability can only be demonstrated by pointing to the systems (the policies, methods, processes and procedures) used to build up quality products and making a commitment to maintaining these. This is what QA Certification and standards are really about. Keywords: Software Standards, Quality Management, Quality Assurance Certification Introduction The goal of this paper is to provide a practical guide on how to achieve software process improvement and gain higher quality products through use of the existing standards and models. Also to give an understanding of what standards and models are and what they can deliver; to show how standards can be selected and tailored to meet the very different needs of the developers and the customers; finally, to examine the relationship between quality and software process improvement strategies and standards. The paper addresses, highlights and compares some points of interest of the most important standards and models like: ISO/IEC/IEEE/EIA 12207, ISO 9001, the IEEE Software Engineering Standards, ESA (European Space Agency) software standards, CMM (Capability Maturity Model) for software, ISO-15504 (SPICE). The importance is to identify the target audience for each approach, describe the coverage of each approach, and indicate areas of overlap among them

Webdatanet: Innovation and quality in web-based data collection

In light of the growing importance of web-based data in the social and behavioral sciences, WEBDATANET was established in 2011 as a COST Action (IS 1004) to create a multidisciplinary network of web-based data collection experts: (web) survey methodologists, psychologists, sociologists, linguists, economists, Internet scientists, media and public opinion researchers. The aim was to accumulate and synthesize knowledge regarding methodological issues of web-based data collection (surveys, experiments, tests, non-reactive data, and mobile Internet research), and foster its scientific usage in a broader community