A QUALITY SYSTEM FOR A SOFTWARE HOUSE

The international recognition of the ISO 9001 created a quality standard which, in an integral manner, expresses general requirements for the design and development, production, installation, and maintenance of products. This article discusses the special form and practical content a software house can give its quality system within the framework of the ISO 9001. The software house concept is limited here to that of an external organization performing custom work. In a slightly modified form, however, many ideas have a much larger area of application. A quality system for such a software house must be highly flexible, for there must be sufficient freedom to incorporate the specific/additional quality requirements of the customer. Also, quality assurance takes place on two levels: in the project, for realizing the information system that the customer requested, and in the office of the software house itself. The flexibility mentioned above is attained by conceiving a quality system with a modular structure. The quality system describes both the quality of the process of realizing an information system and the quality of the products and intermediate products created during that process.