The TickIT certification scheme

In the UK there are national procedures for the granting of authoritative certificates to organizations who can demonstrate effective quality management in line with international standards. The author explains how the Department of Trade and Industry have been working with industry to extend these procedures to the software and IT sector. Whilst TickIT is a certification scheme, this is not the main goal. The principal objective is to stimulate developers to think about what quality really is and how it may be achieved. Unless certification is purely a byproduct of the more fundamental aim of delivering quality, much of the effort will be wasted. To stimulate thinking, TickIT includes some quality themes which set out the context within which quality management systems (QMS) certification should be perceived