Standards

ISO, the world’s largest developer of international standards, has created a new standard to address process improvement for Very Small Entities (VSEs), aligning their characteristics with the best existing practices in software engineering: the ISO/IEC 29110 standard.

This standard provides key material that requires minimal adaptation effort for its application by VSEs and provides a way to be recognized (evaluation and certification) as a quality software producer. It is a set of rules:

• For the VSE implementation of processes.
• For VSEs, certification bodies and evaluators, for the evaluation and certification of VSEs.
• Defined as a first step for certification of more complete models e.g. CMMI, ISO 15504/330xx, and ISO 9001.
• For Software, Systems and IT Services.

With the help of experts in the field of software and standardization, ISO/IEC 29110 allows you to:

• Facilitate the development work giving a unique methodology with recognized techniques,
• Emphasize shared communication and understanding in all parts of an organization,
• Improve project management to achieve product quality, on-time delivery and control of the budget,
• Improve the image of the company and facilitate the marketing,
• Increase competitiveness, customer confidence and greater sales and export potential,
• Help in the definition of best practices and avoid repetition of errors giving consistency and improvement in the development processes.

The ISO/IEC 29110 standard series are available on the ISO web pages. Click on the bold ones in the following figure (some of the following documents require payment on the ISO web site for full viewing)  to access the related page:

• ISO/IEC TR 29110-1:2016 (free): Systems and software engineering — Lifecycle profiles for Very Small Entities (VSEs) — Part 1: Overview.
• ISO/IEC TR 29110-3-1:2015 (free): Systems and software engineering — Lifecycle profiles for Very Small Entities (VSEs) — Part 3-1: Assessment guide.
• ISO/IEC 29110-3-3:2016 : Systems and software engineering — Lifecycle profiles for Very Small Enterprises (VSEs) — Part 3-3: Certification requirements for conformity assessments of VSE profiles using process assessment and maturity models.
• ISO/IEC 29110-4-1:2011 : Software engineering — Lifecycle profiles for Very Small Entities (VSEs) — Part 4-1: Profile specifications: Generic profile group.
• ISO/IEC TR 29110-5-1-2:2011 (free): Lifecycle profiles for Very Small Entities (VSEs) — Part 5-1-2: Management
• and engineering guide: Generic profile group: Basic profile.
• ISO/IEC TR 29110-5-1-1:2012 (free): Software engineering — Lifecycle profiles for Very Small Entities (VSEs) — Part 5-1-1: Management and engineering guide: Generic profile group: Entry profile.
• ISO/IEC TR 29110-5-2-1:2016 : Systems and software engineering — Lifecycle profiles for Very Small Entities (VSEs) — Part 5-2-1: Organizational management guidelines.

Note: The Maturity Model for VSEs in the spatial domain (developed by the European Space Agency, EUMETSAT, CNES, DLR, JAXA, National Institute for Space Research (Brazil) and Softwcare SL) has been proposed to become the ISO/IEC 29110-6-1, 7.1 and 3.1 ed3.

To know where to start with this standard, visit our pages dedicated to how to improve your VSE. To use the guides in a practical way with additional materials (description of how to execute each task, examples and templates, etc.) visit our Guides.