Software QA standards - the coming revolution

Current government documents addressing software quality asssurance reflect the confusion in the field and the constraints imposed by the stigma of hardward QA. This paper illustrates these problems by examining, on a comparative basis, elements of the most important Department or Defense (DoD) software QA standards and specifications. The current status, strength, and weakness of these documents are discussd in detail. A new approach being followed by DoD to resolve the issues is briefly described.