SSDC News Alert!

[swatts]

As you may have noticed I studiously avoid writing marketing pieces carefully disguised as news..........

But NOT today!

It's only because I'm chuffed though as we got our ISO9001:2008 certificate on Friday and it's been a pretty positive process.

First of all it's a fair investment of time and money for a company of 3 (about $4k a year for consultancy and surveillance) and that doesn't include our time in designing and maintaining the processes. Like all business decisions the question needs to be ..can we get the money back?. Rather luckily for us one of my customers pays this as part of their support agreement..bonus!

Why do they do this you may ask, is it because we're so amazing. Nope, it just makes their paperwork easier. If we have a certificate they don't need to audit us, they in turn don't need to be audited and so the gravy train rolls on.

So for the small businesses out there here's what we did....

We hired a consultant (Daniel Russell) that supplied an online Quality Management System (QMS), this was modified to our company needs.

The QMS describes the scope of the system (design, provision and supply of software with associated support) and then describes the processes and documents used for handling complaints, training, roles and responsibilities etc. Covering Design, Nonconforming product, purchasing, inspection and monitoring. It has an online audit, management meeting, training and feedback system.

I found this to be the difficult bit to get my head around, luckily our consultant made it nice and easy.

We automated what we could (see Emails, Bug Reporting, Backups, VPS) and were in the lucky position where we all work in approximately the same fashion (consider that between the 3 of us we have about 90 years experience, so it could have been a bit like ductaping 6 angry giraffes into a cardboard box). For us automation is great, it's what we do and saves us writing documentation. So for example the method for backing up is to select backup from a menu on our project management tool.

Let's look back at the working in the same fashion comment, this I think is what has made it relatively straight forward and is a bit of an advantage for us. We have a common design methodology that allows us to all develop code in a similar way and to a similar rhythm. So although our methodology may cause some contention out there in the community, the fact we all comply to it is HUGELY valuable (Oh and we broke though 200+ projects now, so it's pretty tried and tested).

Bug reporting and version control are other fantastic tools that most of us routinely employ and that the world of quality just loves!. Showing how we can download the latest versions of our documents, just by right-clicking and selecting update was a real boon.

So the assessment was conducted last Friday by our assessor Stan and we sailed through with nothing more than a "Well Done!". He was extremely helpful and made some very good points. It took 6 hours and made my brain hurt!. We will then be checked yearly and the jobs a good-un!

The benefits are pretty easy, we are adding value to our service so we can charge more, but on top of that are that good practices make good software. The effort we put in means that the system works for us, rather than us bending to it. In the UK military, Govt, large blue chips all would like their suppliers to have it, because it saves them money and time in assessing us.

Lots of love

Quality Steve