Standards compliant software development
W. Emmerich, Adam Finkelstein, Carlo Montangero, R. Stevens · City Research Online (City University London) · 1997
Software engineering standards determine practices that `compliant' software processes shall follow. Standards generally define practices in terms of constraints that must hold for documents. The document types identified by standards not only include typical development products, such as user requirements, but also process-oriented documents, such as progress reviews and management reports. The degree of standards compliance can be established by checking these documents against the constraints. It is is neither practical nor desireable to enforce compliance at all points in the development process thus compliance must be managed rather than imposed. In this paper we define a model of standards and compliance. We then outline a lightweight implementation of the model built on a generic document management system. Finally, we discuss the broader implications of our finding for process modelling and the management of inconsistent information.