Standards

There are a great many standards in use across the various software industries. Most have their origins in defence, aerospace, and government work. A few have come about due to lessons learnt after failures and disasters. Few companies want failures, but many ensure failures occur by not using standards effectively.

Standards from any industry may be adapted and applied either in full or in part to other industries. What matters is the context in which it is applied and used. A typical example:

The Capability Maturity Model was defined to make Defence software projects more predictable and to gain a minimum quality profile for the software. Since software development originates from the electronics industry, it was a fairly straightforward step to adapt CMM for Systems Engineering. When that was achieved it was found that the framework could be applied to any engineering or software organisation by identifying common practices used by all processes and specific practices applicable to themed processes.

After a number of years of assessments and compay profiling, it was found that the techniques could be widened to include resource management processes, commercial relationships, and support functions.

The principles of the assessment approach that uses CMMi is now used to assess the maturity of entire sectors of industry (e.g. power companies) and will eventually extend to include medical facilities (hospitals & clinics), manufacturing organisations, food manufacturing, telecommunications infrastructure providers, satellite services providers, even public transport infrastructures. All using the maturity model approach to express the the capabilities of participants and providers.

There are a number of standards applied internationally that all organisations can benefit from adopting, regardless of industry sector. These include:

• ISO9000
• ISO27000
• ISO14000
•  

Other standards are adopted in broad sectors of industries.

The European Space Agency, and many of the Eurozone country-specific space agencies, use the ECSS family of standards. The ECSS standards have evolved from the work done by the larger space companies over the last 50+ years. Committees made of of the space industry companies, the agencies and the governments supporting ESA monitor and update the ECSS at regular intervals as use and technology evolves. These standards are publically available from the ECSS website. They cover all the work activities that go into making a spacecraft and its ground support services. In most cases this covers satellites, but the standards also cover manned spacecraft.

The United States of America use their own space agency standards defined by NASA, but they also use standards defined by their Department of Defence and the international standards bodies.

The UK national Grid is undergoing a major evolutionary step forward. It was originally designed in the 1950-60 when power generation was centralised. Power was transmitted along power lines using pylons to substations, whereupon it was distributed to local communities vial smaller substations. The whole grid was predominantly a top-down tree-root like network.

With the introduction of solar farms, wind farms, provate generators, wave farms and estuary generators, the power generation sources became more distributed. Unfortunately, it also became more prone to instability as re-distribution and transmission of power was not designed-in to the National Grid infrastructure. As the provision of interface equipment became more profitable, more companies started providing devices that interfaced to the grid network itself, which can introduce problems for the network management organisations. Research by the larger organisations also showed that materials technology had evolved to such an extent that it was now more economical to transmit power as HVDC. This of course required a whole new set of hardware and electronics to support the new goals.

The industry decided to adopt standards that had an even greater focus on safety, not just on the hardware, but at the higher systems level and at the, now essential, software level. This led to the adoption of IEC61508, comprising part 1 for Systems, part 2 for hardware and part 3 for Software. The family of ISO standards relating to product conformance was also reinforced, mainly due to the variable quality of imported electronic components. New safety cases were required to cope with the new transmission and delivery methods, and the re-distribution and balancing requirements of a two-way power distribution network.