Standards Compliant Software Development

Software engineering standards determine practices that `compliant' software processes shall follow. Standards generally de ne practices in terms of constraints that must hold for documents or the information in these documents. The document types identi ed by standards include not only typical development products, such as user requirements, but also process-oriented documents, such as progress reviews and management reports. The degree of standards compliance can be established by checking these documents against the constraints. It is is neither practical nor desirable to enforce compliance at all points in the development process, thus compliance must be managed rather than imposed. In this paper we de ne a model of standards and compliance. We then outline a lightweight implementation of the model built on a generic document management system. Finally, we discuss the broader implications of our work for process modelling and the management of inconsistent information.