Critical view of the application of the ISO standard for quality assurance

Abstract. The aim of this paper is to initiate a debate on quality assurance and the application of the ISO 9001 in the system development field. It is claimed that unquestioning application of ISO 9001 can be a backwards step in the practice and research of system development. Five aspects of quality are identified in order to design and evaluate the quality of information systems: technical quality, use quality, aesthetic quality, symbolic quality and organizational quality. We find that the standard solely emphasizes technical quality. The standard promotes the ideal of linear, phase-oriented system development, based on a fixed requirement specification and a document-driven process. This is in contrast to most research findings, which criticize one-sided adaptation of phase orientation in system development.