12.7 Summary | Implementing and Integrating Product Data Management and Software Configuration Management (Artech House Computing Library)

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In all engineering domains, standards have a long tradition. It is a common belief that standards can help improve life cycle processes, in product quality, development, and production efficiency. Further, standards are used as a means of communication between different stakeholders and between different tools.

This chapter has shown that many standards can be classified per engineering domain, per type of the process they cover, or per the technology they use or address. It is impossible to make a clear orthogonal classification, as they are often overlapping, and it is certain that the same standard can fall into several different categories. Many standards are closely related, and it is not seldom that some standards are the products of mergers, further evolvement, or the adaptation of old standards.

PDM uses and complies with many standards. STEP is a standard that is directly related to PDM. It provides the means to specify an information model in a standard way using EXPRESS language. STEP also includes a number of parts that apply in particular engineering domains or that provide support for different tools. Other standards extensively used by PDM are CM standards. These standards are also used by SCM, for process management only and not as directly integrated in the SCM tools. Most of the several SCM standards originate from CM standards. Probably, the most influential de facto standard for use of SCM is the CMM .. The CMM ^®identifies SCM as one of the key process areas in the maturity of an organization for software development management. A special category of standards is related to technology. The standards from this category can be incorporated in the tools. Besides, certain parts of STEP, SGML, and even more so XML are used extensively by PDM and PDM-related tools.

We can expect many new standards related to system and software engineering in the future. The development of technologies and increasing competition will lead to the appearance of many new tools that need to interoperate. The requirements for interoperability and reduced development costs will increasingly demand the use of standards.

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