Software Engineering Standards Checklists

In 1992 many users of critical software standards commented to Stan Magee, who was then a part of a group within the International standards organization (ISO) that develop certain types of software process standards, that since standards were developed by committee were often unclear and hard to read. Firms had a hard time reducing the fog surrounding a standard and determining what were the correct criteria to satisfy it.

Therefore in 1992 Stan Magee founded Software Engineering Process Technology (SEPT) to produce checklist for standards. His goal was to produce a product that would aid companies in meeting the requirements of a standards with less cost and time.
One of the first step in meeting the requirements of a process standard is to identify all the artifacts required by the document. Therefore, SEPT developed a checklist system based upon the premise that all artifacts for meeting a process are composed of Procedure, Policy, Plan, Records, Document, Audits and Review. In this schema manuals,drawings, reports, scripts and specifications are included in the document category

Then SEPT turned this premise into a template for producing a checklist for standard. The steps that SEPT goes through to produce a checklist is to identify all the artifacts called out in the standard. Since most standards are written by committees it is difficult at times to determine what artifacts are required.  The trained Software Engineers at SEPT go through each standard clause by clause to determine what is required by that standard.

These results are transcribed to a checklist template. The template is indexed by clause number of the standard and to artifact type.  If an artifact is called out more than once, only the first reference is stipulated in the template Then the SEPT’s engineering department conducted a second review of the complete checklist to ensure that the document producers did not leave out a physical piece of evidence that a “reasonable person” would expect to find. 

SEPT checklists are sold and used around the world by companies from Tasmania, Australia to Park Ave, New York

Checklist by category

• Medical Devices – Checklists for software standards used by the Medical devices industry
• Quality – Checklist used to satisfy the requirements of quality standards
• Life Cycle – Checklist used to satisfy the requirements of system and software life cycle standards
• Data Security -- Checklist used to satisfy the requirements of data security and privacy standards

After selecting the SEPT product, you want, "Click on BUY learn more about a specific SEPT product at the NORMADOC Store. This store provides additional information about the product and enables you to purchase it."

• Templates for software and system develpment

Early on in SEPT history many organizations wanted to know if we produce templates for software engineering processes. We had looked at this product and determine that:

• A generic template for a process would be difficult because of all the different types of business that used software processes
• To get a well-qualified software engineer who would want to take such a job like that on and produce a quality product were few in numbers.

However, we did decide that we could produce templates for the following process and did find extremely well qualify people to take on this task

• Software documentation, Author by Andy Coster with over 20 years documentation experience
• Software configuration management, Author by John Neorr with over 30 years’ experience with the Boeing Company in IT
• Software maintenance process, authored by Thomas M. Pigoski who has written many standards and book on the subject

Software Engineering Templates

After selecting the SEPT product, you want, "Click on BUY learn more about a specific SEPT product at the NORMADOC Store. This store provides additional information about the product and enables you to purchase it."
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