Abstract

One way to develop standards professionals is by having professional graduate students involved in the application and improvement of international standards. At the École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS), a 7,500-student engineering school of Montréal, International Software Engineering Standards are introduced and used in Software Quality Assurance and Software Process Improvement courses and industrial projects conducted by graduate professional software engineering and IT students. These 2 course include an intervention where teams of students have to do a project with local organizations as well as tailoring International software engineering standards such as the new set of ISO/IEC 29110 standards and freely available guides targeted at very small enterprises and software development groups. Three projects, conducted by graduate professional students, i.e. graduate students working full time in an organization, using the new ISO/IEC 29110 are presented as well as a cost and benefit evaluation using a recently published ISO Methodology to assess the economic benefits of the implementation, in a Canadian engineering company, of the ISO/IEC 29110 standard. Collaboration with a Peruvian university lead to the development of teaching material in Spanish and the implementation of the ISO/IEC 29110 standard in Peruvian small software enterprises. Also, collaborations between ÉTS and a Haitian university (INUQUA) lead to the teaching and deployment the ISO/IEC 29110 in VSEs of Haiti are presented. A project to adapt the ISO/IEC 29110 to the teaching of software development in a technical college is discussed. Finally, we present the results of a study, conducted in Ireland, of attitudes, opinions and sentiment towards ISO/IEC 29110 that exist in commercial organizations, which shows support for the need to educate the next generation of standards professionals to embrace such standards initiatives.