Establishing a practical quality system in small and medium software enterprises

With the success of the ISO 9000 standards more and more organizations are forced to establish a quality system in order to attain ISO 9000 certification. This paper describes a way, which enables small- and medium-sized software enterprises to create a practical quality system. The idea is to introduce the quality system with a quality management project similar to typical software development projects. In order to describe the organization of this project a modular structure of the software quality system and a corresponding structure of the project team is presented. The schedule of the quality management project is divided into phases, which are similar to typical phases of a software development project: preparation, elicitation, analysis, design, realization, certification and maintenance. Each of these phases is described with its main activities.