ISO/IEC 12207
Software Engineering
Life Cycle Processes

Definition

On 7 April 1995, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), collaborating closely with the International Electrotechnical Commision (IEC), published ISO/IEC 12207 Information Technology - Software Life Cycle Processes, which is an international standard that establishes a common framework for software life cycles processes that provides a well-defined terminology for processes, activities, and tasks for defining, controlling, and improving software life cycle processes.

In 2001, this standard was extended by ISO/IEC 12207/FDAM 1, an amendement that fixed certain defects and added additional appendices providing a process reference model.

ISO/IEC 12207 was not a major source of the material in the OPEN Process Framework (OPF). Although it did provide some additional tasks, it primarily acted as another independent source of reusable process information for verifying the completeness, correctness, and appropriateness of the OPF process components and their descriptions.

Comparison With OPF

The OPEN Process Framework (OPF) is a superset of ISO/IEC 12207 in several senses:

• Every ISO/IEC 12207 process, activity, and task is included in one or more OPF activities and tasks. Note that the mapping between ISO/IEC 12207 and OPF is not simple because the mapping is often not one-to-one.
• OPF contains activities and tasks than are not specified in ISO/IEC 12207.
• OPF also contains other process components (e.g., producers, languages) that are not included in ISO/IEC 12207.

ISO/IEC 12207 organizes its activities and tasks by processes and groups these processes as follows:

• Primary Life-Cycle Processes
• Supporting Life-Cycle Processes
• Organizational Life-Cycle Processes

ISO/IEC Primary Life-Cycle Processes

TBD:

ISO/IEC Supporting Life-Cycle Processes

TBD:

ISO/IEC Organizational Life-Cycle Processes

TBD:

Incorporation Into OPF

The following documents where RDD fits into the OPEN Process Framework:

• TBD.