e-Talk Radio: Magee, Stan, and Peter Voldner, 22 March 2001

12207.com will give you some insight into the spectrum and the quantity of these standards. Now, Stan and I, to deal with this challenge, developed a simple way to do the selection. And it consists of six simple steps. Now, the essence of this approach is to choose the standard on the basis of a process area that the corporation is interested in. Now, typically when you are tackling a process improvement problem, you're not tackling all of it at once. You will select either requirements or perhaps software testing, perhaps problem resolution, even documentation. Just to name some of the process areas. On the basis of that process area, it sort of cuts down on the number of possible standards and it helps a corporation to focus on those that are most appropriate. Now, you may say, well, how do we choose the process areas? Well, we've chosen them based on the 12207 document, as well as other process standards that are becoming relatively well recognized. So we feel that the process basis is solid and well established as a foundation to build an understanding of what's available. So, that's in essence the principles that we have adopted, Carol.

Carol: And we're going to take a short break for weather, and a couple of other things, messages from our sponsors, and we'll be back to talk more with Stan Magee and Peter Voldner about what are the six steps that you can use to choose the right process standard for your company? And we'll be back shortly.

Welcome back to Quality Plus e-Talk with Carol Dekkers. I'm Carol Dekkers. And we've been talking this week about software process standards. And as one of our guests, Stan Magee, mentioned, when you mention software process standards, people's eyes glaze over. And it's almost like you're inviting them to come to a root canal. I think that's a great analogy. We've been talking to Stan Magee, who's President of the Software Engineering Process Technology Company based in Seattle, Washington. He's also the convener of working group 7, which is the software lifecycle management standards, within the ISO software engineering group. And our other guest is Peter Voldner, who comes to us from Toronto, Canada, who is President of Peregrine Software, whose firm has a goal of helping clients reach higher productivity and quality using the latest in industry best practices, including preparation for ISO 9001. And we've been talking about all these software process standards. And there are hundreds. If anyone does their research, goes onto the Web, and takes a look at the number of software engineering standards that are out there, it's just an absolute quagmire. And the Software Productivity Consortium, out of Maclean, Virginia, has actually come up with a mapping on their Web site of all of these different types of standards. IEEE standards, ISO standards, SPICE standards, you name it. It seems like every time you turn around, another standards group is popping up. So I'd like to commend Stan and Peter for really talking the bull by the horns and creating a pathway that companies can use to kind of wade through this quagmire, this swamp of software engineering standards. Now, along that line, I think a lot of people who are listening know about ISO 9000, or they've read about ISO 9000, and they think that it applies just to manufacturing. They might have heard of the Capability Maturity Model. They've heard mention right now on the show of 12207, and they've heard mention of SPICE, the Software Process Improvement Capability Determination model, which is