Software development related standards to be aware of

With today's visual tools, even hobbyists and students can create excellent, professional applications. However, once software development becomes a business, you will need to figure out more efficient and more robust processes for your whole practice of writing applications.

In case you are interested in process improvement, there are certain global related standards that you should be aware of. Firstly, there's THE standard (as the saying goes), called "Systems and software engineering — Software life cycle processes", or by another name ISO/IEC 12207.

Wikipedia says about the standard as follows: "The standard has the main objective of supplying a common structure so that the buyers, suppliers, developers, maintainers, operators, managers and technicians involved with the software development use a common language."

Thus, the ISO 12207 standard can be thought to be the base for other software development related standards. Another important standard is ISO/IEC 15504, titled "Information technology — Process assessment" or sometimes referred to as SPICE (Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination).

The third interesting standard is ISO/IEC 19770, which is about Software Asset Management or SAM. This standard is divided into three parts, one for the process of maintaining software assets, and two for identifying and tagging software.

If you are aware of at least these three standards, you should have at least a starting point for standards-based development work.

Happier development!