From the many to the one-one company´s path to standardization

With approximately 75 people working in software development, COLSA Corporation, primarily a systems integration, engineering, and development firm, decided to pursue IOSO 9001 registration and Capability Maturity Model (CMM) Level 3 assessment. Management reviewed the difficulties and rewards of attaining registration and assessment and made the resource commitments to achieve them. The corporate intent was to establish a single, common process based on appropriate, available software engineering standards. We saw that in achieving this goal we would improve our practices and resulting software. But, it was not a simple matter of starting at one point and marching toward the destination The end point was clear, but we had multiple starting points. Our developers did, and do, work on varied types of systems (e.g. real-time embedded, database applications and simulations) using differing practices and standards (government, industry, international, and in-house). We have stabilized our process and we are now at the real starting point on our quest for actual software quality improvement, increased developer and customer satisfaction and even better profits. This paper discusses the approach we chose, our experiences along the way and what we might suggest to others based on our newly gained hindsight