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Why?

Conforming to guidelines and standards helps ensure the credibility of the quality of your product and prevents reliability, privacy and security issues.

How?

Select the guidelines, best practices, checklists, laws and standards that are relevant to your product and define test cases to verify its compliance. Involve experts on the given standard to ensure that all aspects of the standard are addressed. If a standard is used for external communication, certification by an external body is required.

Ingredients

• The appropriate guidelines and standards.
• An understanding that conformance to guidelines is not an ‘afterthought’ and should be addressed from the beginning of the project.
• Involvement of an accredited standardisation institute, if needed.

In practice

Companies and teams decide which guidelines and standards should be applied. These may include coding guidelines, ISO standards, relevant laws and more. Fields like security, privacy, reliability and medical devices have their own standards.

Phase(s) of use

In the following project phase(s) guideline conformity analysis can be used:

• Realisation