Being ISO 9001 certified all the engineering s/w are to be validated in our company . Sometimes the auditiors are quite unaware of widely used s/w's like Caesar II esp bcos of its specialist nature.I am keen to know the following

1)Being widely used all over the globe is there any agency which approve's Caesar II s/w and approve it during each of its new version release .

2)How does Coade validate/benchmark Caesar II software does it comply to any quality standards.

3)Will Coade provide its user with a copy of the formal approvals received from various agencies/organizations for their records.

4)How do my other friends in this forum go about with this issue in their companies.

Thanks

In answer to your QA questions:

1) In general, the answer here is "no". Different organizations may have some sort of acceptance criteria, which means if the software is acceptable for use, they won't object to it. This avoids an "out and out" approval and any associated liability that goes along with it.

The one case I am aware of is with Stoomwezen, the Dutch certification authority. Stoomwezen does approve software for use on projects in The Netherlands. Each version of CAESAR II, beginning with Version 3.22, has been submitted for (and received) approval from Stoomwezen. (Approval usually takes 3-6 months after we release the software, so Version 4.30 has not been approved yet.)

2) The internal QA performed for each new version of CAESAR II is described in the CAESAR II Quality Assurance Manual. This can be purchased for $250. (See the back cover of the Quick Reference Guide for details.)

Basically, we reviewed as many Quality Standards as we could get our hands on . We then took the best procedures from these standards (those that lend themselves to specifically software development) and developed our own set of procedures. Actual numerical validation is performed by re-running over 300 stored jobs and comparing results.

3) Yes, but the only one we have to provide is the one from Stoomwezen. Note, if you run a job to the Stoomwezen code, the approval certificate is printed following the Table of Contents.

4) The CAESAR II Quality Assurance Manual is accompanied by a diskette set containing a QA comparison program, and 40+ benchmark jobs. Users performing their own QA use this to validate their CAESAR II installation.