A Process Model for Certification of Product and Process

Abstract

Software certification has become more and more popular, especially for software developers, as it can provide confidence to customers that the product is of acceptable quality. Software certification can be done at two levels: the development process and the software product itself. There are many different certification schemes, such as ISO 9001 and CMM for development process, and Y2K compliance for software product. This chapter first identifies two process models, one for process certification and another for product certification. We then propose a certification process for Commercial off-The-Shelf (COTS) product and its development process. Finally a generalized model of certification process (GCM) for both product certification and development process certification is developed. Example certification schemes are then mapped to this model to illustrate its validity. The evaluation shows that the popular certification schemes fit well into GCM. GCM may be used as a basis to develop a certification scheme for particular application domains or to validate a particular certification process.