2 nd Software Engineering Standards User's Survey
Authors: Susan K. Land
Venue: Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Symposium and Forum on Software Engineering Standards (1999)

For over 20 years the IEEE Computer Society has sponsored the development of software engineering standards under the auspices of the Software Engineering Standards Committee (SESC). The current standard set comprises some 40 standards numbering about 1,700 pages and is considered to represent a well-documented body of knowledge. This critical mass of standards has motivated SESC to broaden their mission statement to include the implementation of standards and the assessment of implementations.SESC is now leading an initiative to create new products and services based on, or derived from, the software engineering standards they have developed. The identification of who uses SESC standards, and what their needs are, has become vitally important to those who determine how to make the standards more valuable to standards users.SESC's new mission is to: identify and understand user needs in the field of software engineering, develop standards that respond effectively to user needs, support implementation of these standards, and facilitate meaningful evaluation of resulting implementations Within SESC, the focus has been on standards that either specify attributes about intermediate results of the software processes or attributes of the software processes. The implementation of such standards is achieved by a person or an organization using the standard. The standard provides a benchmark for evaluating the performance of the software process or the attributes of the process result. However, this results in different interpretations to the same software engineering standard as users of software standards employ the standards in different ways. The urgent need to identify SESC standard users and to solicit user feedback was raised during the Forum on Software Engineering Standards Issues (SES '96) held in October 1996 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The mechanism for this became the first software engineering standards user's survey that was conducted over the Internet from January 1 - March 31, 1997. The results of the survey were presented at the "Users of Software Standards Workshop" as part of the 3rd International Symposium and Forum on Software Engineering Standards (ISESS'97) held June 1-6, 1997, in Walnut Creek, CA. Results may be viewed at http://www.isess99.com/docs/SESsurvey2.doc. Following ISESS'97, SESC determined a second survey was required. The survey format was reworked and approved by SESC Committee members and has been conducted over the Internet, http://www.isess99.org/Survey, from September 25, 1997 - August 1, 1998.Both surveys are an attempt to take a market snapshot of software standards implementation and report the results to those responsible for SESC standards creation and maintenance. This second workshop will provide a report on the status of the recommendations presented to SESC following the first workshop held in Walnut Creek, report the 2 nd survey results, and formulate a set of recommendations based upon these findings to SESC following this second workshop.This workshop will use the information captured from the second user's survey to provide feedback to SESC on improving SES for the benefit of government, trade and industry. This feedback will be provided in the form of recommendations. Workshop participants will also be provided with a status of the technical and marketing recommendations resulting from the first user's survey workshop in Walnut Creek (ISESS '97).