Professional Standards

Question 1

What are the 3 largest standards organisations responsible for setting industry-wide standards?

Answer 1

• The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO),
• The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC)
• The International Telecommunications Union (ITU)
• Also World Wide Web Consortium – recommendations for the development of web technologies.

Question 2

What are some examples of standards that standards organisations are responsible for?

Answer 2

• USB
• Bluetooth
• Firewire
• PCi cards
• RAID
• Etc.

Question 3

What is meant by ‘propriety standards’?

Answer 3

A technology or product that is owned exclusively by a single company that carefully guards knowledge about the technology or the product’s inner workings.

If this technology is widely used, then all developers must write their software to comply with this standard.

Question 4

What is a ‘de facto’ standard?

Answer 4

“De facto” is Latin for “in fact”, so a de facto standard is one that is used as a universal standard just because over time it became widely used, and not because the standard was developed and approved by a standards committee.

Question 5

What are ‘open standards’?

Answer 5

These are standards that are adopted and maintained by not-for-profit organisations and their development occurs on the basis contributions by independent developers.

Software produced under open standards is often updated be a community of developers who make regular updates available to anyone, usually for no or minimal cost. This software is often of very high quality because the community of developers act quickly to fix problems. E.g. Open Office.

Question 6

What is an example of a de facto standard?

Answer 6

The Microsoft Word doc standard has become the de facto standard for supplying word processed documents and all word processor programs need to be able to write and read .doc files.

Question 7

What is BCS?

Answer 7

BCS (British Computing Society) - The Charted Institute for IT. This covers pretty much all the professions within IT

Question 8

What are some professional bodies?

Answer 8

BCS (British Computing Society) - The Charted Institute for IT.
ACM (Association for Computing Machinery)
UK IT Association
Association of Computer Professionals
ISACA
etc…

Question 9

What are the BCS codes of conduct?

Answer 9

You make IT for everyone
Show what you know, learn what you dont
Respect the organisation or the individual you work for
Keep it real, keep it professional

Question 10

What are the 10 commandments of computer ethics?

Answer 10

1) Thou shalt not use a computer to harm other people:
2) Thou shalt not interfere with other people’s computer work:
3) Thou shalt not snoop around in other people’s files:
4) Thou shalt not use a computer to steal:
5) Thou shalt not use a computer to bear false witness:
6) Thou shalt not use or copy software for which you have not paid:
7) Thou shalt not use other people’s computer resources without authorization:
8) Thou shalt not appropriate other people’s intellectual output:
9) Thou shalt think about the social consequences of the program you write:
10) Thou shalt use a computer in ways that show consideration and respect:

Question 11

What is an example of a proprietary standard?

Answer 11

DOC files (Microsoft Word Document file format)

Question 12

How do professional standards relate to open source code?

Answer 12

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