Taking into account that small companies in the IT sector, unlike bigger ones, use very little the existing standards, ISO, the world’s largest international standards developer, has performed a survey to understand the reasons and to define potential solutions.

The working group WG24 has indeed defined 20 questions translated into 9 languages to understand the main problems of the small organizations implementing software, their needs and why they use, or don’t use, standards. The survey was conducted in 2006 and received some 392 responses from 29 countries. Of these responses, the 228 companies with less than 25 people were used to a more detailed analysis:

With respect to the use of standards only 18% of these companies use a standard compared to 53% for larger companies. The reason why they do not use a standard is detailed in the following figure:

It has also been noted that, for a large majority (74%) of the SMEs it is very important to have an evaluation and certification scheme and 40% of them ask for ISO certification in particular.

Based on this survey, ISO decided to develop a new set of standards dedicated to organizations, companies or projects of up to 25 people (called VSE or Very Small Entity) and created the ISO/IEC 29110 series. As a standard for the software life cycle already existed (ISO/IEC 12207), it served as a basis and they define the concept of profiles to promote a practical and incremental use of the standard. Other standards such as CMMI or MoProSoft were also used and tailored to adapt them to VSEs specificities.

More than just a list of requirements, the ISO/IEC 29110 defines guidelines that can be used to implement the processes so that a VSE can improve their processes fast and with few resources.

They also defined all the necessary requirements for the assessment and certification of this standard.