A Lotus Notes Implementation of A Workflow Automation Tool for ISO 9001 Certification

Software quality management involves defining quality goals for software products, establishing plans to achieve these goals, monitoring and adjusting the plans and activities to ensure the software meet the needs of customers. In software development, we believe that it is important to focus on processes and products. As software development involves complex and dynamic interactions of software processes, the lack of a well defined process has thus a direct impact on products’ quality. Recently, implementing a quality management system to facilitate the ISO 9001 certification is becoming popular. The essence of the ISO standard is to ‘say what you do and do what you say’. We consider software process as a sequence of tasks that depend on the cooperation between collaborating individuals. In this paper, we describe a system to assist companies to build a QMS and facilitate the ISO 9001 certification. The system has two components: workflow capturing (WC) and workflow enactment (WE). The WC component captures workflow elements and lets users say what they do. It adopts three models: i) an actor model, ii) an information model, and iii) a process model. Transformation between process and actor models is supported to provide different views to understand processes and actors. Workflow will then translated into specification. Based on it, the WE component, which is implemented with Lotus Notes 4.6, helps users to do what they say and implement workflow by automating task sequences and bringing responsible actors into the process.

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