Over the past twenty years since the first IEEE software engineering standards were published, the practice of software engineering has grown from an individual craft to a highly organized team effort. There has been the growing emphasis on the adoption of organization-level processes that are intended to be applied repeatedly to all software engineering projects within an organization. Standards not only must be technically excellent on an individual basis, but each must takes its place within a suite of standards that can be adopted in totality or in part by organizations.

Since 1994, the IEEE Software and Systems Engineering Standards Committee (S2ESC) has been following a strategy to achieve the desired level of integration of the individual standards within the collection. The collection has been aligned with key international standards and with key standards in related disciplines such as quality management and project management. An umbrella standard, ISO/IEC 12207, Standard for Software Life Cycle Processes, has been adopted as the integrating standard for software engineering processes and for the customer relationship. And all IEEE software engineering standards dealing with software processes and the data that they produce have been harmonized with the umbrella standard.

The IEEE Software Engineering standards collection has grown large enough so that users can no longer expect to intuitively understand the relationships among the various component standards. Developed with direct input from software engineering professionals around the world, IEEE has updated and restructured its software engineering standards into a framework of terminology, quality management, software engineering and system disciplines. The Software and Systems Engineering Standards Committee (S2ESC) further has adopted a model of software engineering based on the "things" that software engineers use. Software engineering is performed by a project. The project interacts with customers and uses resources to perform processes and produce products. With this S2ESC has organized its collection of standards around four objects: Customer, Process, Product and Resource.

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