ISO/IEC 90003:2004

This International Standard (ISO/IEC 90003) provides guidance for organizations in the application of ISO 9001:2000 to the acquisition, supply, development, operation and maintenance of computer software.

Software engineering— Guidelines for the application of ISO 9001:2000 to computer software

It identifies the issues which should be addressed and is independent of the technology, life cycle models, development processes, sequence of activities and organizational structure used by an organization. The guidance and identified issues are intended to be comprehensive but not exhaustive. Where the scope of an organization's activities includes areas other than computer software development, the relationship between the computer software elements of that organization's quality management system and the remaining aspects should be clearly documented within the quality management system as a whole.

Clauses 4, 5 and 6 and parts of clause 8 of ISO 9001:2000 are applied mainly at the "global" level in the organization, although they do have some effect at the "project/product level". Each project or product development may tailor the associated parts of the organization's quality management system, to suit project/product-specific requirements.

Throughout ISO 9001:2000, "shall" is used to express a provision that is binding between two or more parties, "should" to express a recommendation among possibilities and "may" to indicate a course of action permissible within the limits of ISO 9001:2000. In this International Standard (ISO/IEC 90003), "should" and "may" have the same meaning as in ISO 9001:2000, i.e. "should" to express a recommendation among possibilities and "may" to indicate a course of action permissible within the limits of this International Standard.

Organizations with quality management systems for developing, operating or maintaining software based on this International Standard may choose to use processes from ISO/IEC 12207 and ISO/IEC 12207:1995/Amd. 1:2002 to support or complement the ISO 9001:2000 process model. It should be noted that the quality management process defined in ISO/IEC 12207:1995/Amd. 1:2002, F.3.1.4 is not consistent with the definition of quality management in ISO 9000, ISO 9001 and other ISO/TC 176 standards. The related paragraphs of ISO/IEC 12207:1995/Amd.1:2002 are referenced in each clause of this International Standard; however, they are not intended to imply requirements additional to those in ISO 9001:2000. Further guidance to the use of ISO/IEC 12207 may be found in ISO/IEC TR 15271. For additional guidance, frequent references are provided to the International Standards for software engineering defined by ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 7 and in particular ISO/IEC 9126-1, ISO/IEC TR 9126-2, ISO/IEC TR 9126-3, ISO/IEC TR 9126-4, ISO/IEC 15939 and ISO/IEC 15504 1, 2, 3  (all parts ). Where these references are specific to a clause or subclause of ISO 9001:2000 they appear after the guidance for that clause or subclause. Where they apply generally across the parts of a clause or subclause, the references are included at the end of the last part of the clause or subclause.

Where text has been quoted from ISO 9001:2000, that text is enclosed in a box, for ease of identification.