How to deal with standards and norms?
Standards play an important role in product development. This is particularly the case when it comes to functional safety. But even without safety aspects, standards must be complied with, which is required by the client or legislator depending on the system and industry.
The increasing complexity in systems engineering also has very specific effects on the use of standards. There are more, and they are being demanded more and more. This is also good for manufacturers, as proven compliance can reduce liability in the event of problems. Apart from the fact that systems generally become better and safer when standards are observed.
ISO as an example
The International Standards Organization is one of the most important publishers of standards. The organization was founded in 1947 and has since over 23,000 standards standards have been published, and currently around 1000 standards are added each year. The accelerated growth is partly a result of the increasing complexity in the world.
The ISO catalog is currently growing by around 1000 standards every year.
Of particular interest to systems engineers is ISO 15288, on which, among other things, the Systems Engineering Handbook of INCOSE based. But there are many others. When I tried to name the most important standards four years ago, three out of four were ISO standards (the last one is an IEC standard). the various standardization organizations generally work well together. In addition to the IEC just mentioned, the better known ones include DIN, OMG, IEEEE and many more.
The work of the standardization organizations costs money and must be financed. The ISO finances itself mainly from membership fees, whereby the members are most of the countries in the world. In addition, many of the authors are not paid by ISO, but by the companies that actively contribute to a standard. Further income is generated through the sale of standards, which are generally subject to a fee. Since Open Source The latter point leads to problems for non-commercial contributors to such projects, as they either have to use the standards illegally or pay for them themselves.
The importance of standards can also be seen in the fact that organizations are struggling to maintain the necessary neutrality. For example, the ISO criticized for the document format OOXML (ISO/IEC 29500), the development of which had caused controversy due to Microsoft's lobbying. Nevertheless, the benefits of ISO and other standardization organizations far outweigh this.
Quality standards
How a standard is used depends on what it describes. In systems engineering, we come across many standards that deal with quality and safety. One of the best known is ISO 9001 (quality management systems). The standard is not specific and can be certified. Over one million organizations have now been certified for ISO 9001.
In the area of quality, the standard generally describes the "what", but not the "how". A company that wants to be ISO 9001 certified must therefore have processes that implement ISO 9001. Implementation is then industry- and company-specific.
Not every standard can be certified. For example, ISO 9001 is the only one of the ISO 9000 family of standards that can be certified. In this case, for example, these are guidelines or instructions. Each organization must decide for itself whether these should be used or not, for example based on the maturity that the organization already has.
Implementation standards
The situation is different with standards such as ISO 11898, which CAN bus specified in the vehicle. This is really about signals, coding and much more that enables reliable communication in the vehicle. These standards provide part of the requirements for a specific system to be developed, such as an ECU.
For implementations, we actually need a Traceability from the corresponding standard into the system specification. Traceability to the corresponding tests would also make sense. In practice, this cannot actually be realized in requirements management, at least not at a fine granular level. On the one hand, the standards are often only available as PDFs, and on the other hand, it is not legally clean to import the standards into the working environment. On the other hand, automated traceability is not quite as important here because the requirements from the standard do not usually change. (Automated traceability is particularly helpful for Dealing with changes) Nevertheless - this would be desirable for consistency and understanding.
Conclusion
Standards and norms are becoming increasingly important. Unfortunately, dealing with them in practice is not as easy as it should be: formats that are difficult to process, such as PDF, as well as legal problems, including sharing standards internally, sometimes make work difficult. The situation is improving in some areas. For example, ISO standards are now also available in epub format, which makes further processing somewhat easier (even if there are still legal issues). The OMG standards are not chargeable, which drastically simplifies sharing. In addition, some OMG standards even include machine-readable data. The ReqIF standard, for example, provides the data model as a CMOF ready.
Nevertheless, standards will not only remain an important part of our work as systems engineers, but their importance will increase. And anyone who deals with them will realize that good standards can also make your work drastically easier.
