Managing standards compliance

Software engineering standards determine practices that "compliant" softwar e processes shall follow. Standards generally define practices in terms of constraints that must hold for documents. The document types identified by standards include typical development products, such as user requirements, and also process-oriented documents, such as progress reviews and managemen t reports. The degree of standards compliance can be established by checkin g these documents against the constraints. It is neither practical nor desi rable to enforce compliance at all points in the development process. Thus, compliance must be managed rather than imposed. We outline a model of stan dards and compliance and illustrate it with some examples. We give a brief account of the notations and method we have developed to support the use of the model and describe a support environment we have constructed. The prin cipal contributions of our work are: the identification of the issue of sta ndards compliance; the development of a model of standards and support for compliance management: the development of a formal model of product state w ith associated notation; a powerful policy scheme that triggers checks; a f lexible and scalable compliance management view.