The ISO certification process has been in existence for 14 years. During that time, hundreds of thousands of suppliers of mainly industrial products and services have become ISO 9000 registered. However, the adoption rate of ISO 9000 certifications in US industry has lagged that of other developed countries. This is now changing; the number of new ISO 9000 certifications being obtained annually...

In 1987, the Geneva-based International Standards Organization (ISO) introduced the ISO 9000-series standards as a way to encourage product and service quality improvement and facilitate international trade. Since that time, ISO 9000 standards have gained international recognition and have been widely adopted by manufacturing and service industries. In December 1999, more than 340,000 ISO 9000-...

Companies that are according to ISO 9000 standards have to maintain a set of documents describing the quality system that include policies, procedures and instructions to assure the final product’s conformance with ISO 9000 requirements. Each change to be introduced in the certified process has to be first written down in the respective documents that are affected by this changes and employees ...

MARK C. PAULK Software Engineering Institute he Capability Maturity Model T Model for Software, developed by the Software Engineering Institute, and the ISO 9000 series of standards, developed by the International Organization for Standardization, have the common concern of quality and process management. The two are driven by similar issues and are intuitively correlated, but they differ in th...