Improving the quality of ISO 9001 audits in the field of software

Internal quality system audits are a compliance requirement of ISO 900\2. R equirements of the internal quality audit clause define quality audit outpu ts in terms of audit planning and scheduling, recording of results and foll ow-up of audit activities. ISO 10011-1 provides general guidance on the con duct of audits. Where domain specific guidance is required on the audit, li ttle support is available from ISO and national standards bodies. In partic ular, there is no freely available checklist support questions which probe the compliance requirements of ISO 9001\2, or provide industry specific gui dance questions for probing the effectiveness of the implementation of the ISO 9001\2 process clauses. This paper reviews a national project to develo p a checklist to probe ISO 9001 requirements for the field of software, and to offer guidance for examining the effectiveness of the implementation of the process clauses in the software domain. It is believed that this proje ct is important for two reasons: the ISO 9001 compliance questions in the c hecklist are generically applicable, and secondly, the structure of the che cklist has been devised to be tailorable to a wide range of application dom ains. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.