A new concept of compliance for software engineering standards

Beginning early in the decade of the 1990s, the IEEE Software Engineering Standards Committee (SESC) initiated a set of long-range planning activities with the ultimate intention of reorganizing itself and its collection to better achieve its mission. Half a decade of intensive planning efforts have positioned us so that we now can clearly see a substantially different role for software engineering standards at the end of another half-decade. This position paper outlines some of those differences. Finally, it suggests that a new form of compliance with software engineering standards will result.