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On Wednesday, November 26, 1997 9:19 AM, Walker, Arlen P
[SMTP:Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- COM] wrote:
<snip>
>
> If you intend to produce crap, ISO9000 will help you ensure that crap
is
> what you produce. But if you intend to produce quality, ISO9000 will
help
> you ensure that you do indeed produce quality. It's not a "joke;" it's
not
> a
> silver bullet, either. It's a tool. It's up to you whether you use it
> wisely
> or foolishly.
>
That all said, how does ISO9000 help produce quality art? After all
(speaking for the multitudes in the software industry), creation of
software is an art unto itself. You can't mechanize it, you can't
streamline it, you can't force it into a box.
I'm not talking about the development *process*, I'm talking about the
development itself. Not the making real of code to do a task, but the
creativity and ideas that occur when the leap from problem to solution
is made. True coders (true documenters, or even all us engineers) do
their best work outside the process--indeed, they live outside the
process, and from that, the rest who don't have that artistry benefit.
Y'know what comes to mind: IBM's research labs in Boca, where they made
a place for some of their best and brightest engineers to just *create*,
to just develop ideas. It was deliberately but "outside the box." What
would ISO9000 do to a fertile environment such as that one?
Personally, most of the software engineers have had too much pride in
their work to let shoddy code out the door. Leave ISO9000 in the
manufacturing field where it belongs.
One statistic I heard some years back was that a company might spend 10
percent of its resources in ISO9000 compliance. That's 10 percent of a
company's resources diverted from producing a salable product. Ouch.
--
"You don't look American."
"Everyone looks American, because Americans are from everywhere."
- Doonesbury
Chuck Martin, Technical Writer
Evolve Software | Personal
chuckm -at- evolvesoftware -dot- com | writer -at- grin -dot- net
www.evolvesoftware.com | www.grin.net/~writer
