domo@tsa.co.uk (Dominic Dunlop) (10/04/90)
Submitted-by: domo@tsa.co.uk (Dominic Dunlop) [John. As requested, permission sought and obtained from Ernie Kummer of Cahners/Ziff Associates, whose telephone number is (708) 635 8800. All he asked was a trailing copyright notice, which I have duly supplied. DFD] [Dominic, Thanks, -mod] The following sidebar is quoted with permission and without comment from ``The Standards Process Breaks Down'', the cover article in Datamation, Sept. 15 1990 (vol.36, no. 18), pages 24 through 32. Get hold of the full piece by Jeff Moad (a senior writer on the magazine's staff) and read it if you wish. Its main thrust is at perceived shortcomings in X3, the U.S. Accredited Standards Committee for Information Processing. One Group That's Working Well Not all formal base standards-setting organizations seem to be struggling to find ways to integrate users and consortia into the process and keep up with demands for establishing standards more quickly. At least one organization, the IEEE POSIX (The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Inc. Portable Operating System Interface for UNIX) Working Group, in just five years, built an impressive record for responding to user and vendor requirements rapidly and working with standards consortia. Established in 1985, the IEEE POSIX Working Group has been attempting to define a set of open operating system interface standards. The goal has been to allow programmers to develop to a standard set of interfaces that would allow programs to work with any number of compliant operating systems. The effort has enjoyed strong user participation and extensive support from standards consortia, and the group has made significant progress in getting POSIX accepted as an international standard. Already POSIX -- which consists of two parts: system interface and shell and tools -- has progressed to the point where the International Standards Organization has proposed a draft international standard. Groups like the Digital Equipment Computer Users Society (DECUS), the 120,000-member user group for Digital Equipment Corp. products, have helped in defining POSIX requirements. And consortia such as X/Open Co. Ltd. and the Open Software Foundation have included POSIX support in their open architectures. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has based a Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) on the POSIX standard. IEEE officials and others say one reason why the POSIX working group has been successful is because it has been able to attract strong user involvement. According to Paul Borrill, the IEEE Computer Society's vice president for standards, many users feel effective on the POSIX technical committee because, under IEEE rules, all voting is done on an individual rather than an institutional basis. ``The users get the same vote as the manufacturers in meetings,'' says Borrill. IEEE groups such as the POSIX Working Group have also been more willing than X3 committees to tackle the complex issue of conformance testing. While the POSIX Working Group does not certify conformance to the standard, it has formed a project to create a standard methodology for testing conformance to POSIX standards. Groups such as NIST are now using those guidelines to create conformance test. Some observers say the success of the IEEE POSIX Working Group shows that the formal standards process can be made to work even in a rapidly changing standards environment. ``The standards need to be developed closest to the end user,'' says the University of Pittsburgh's Michael B. Spring, a professor in the information sciences department. ``IEEE is doing that.'' Reprinted from Datamation, September, 1990. Copyright (c) by Cahners/Ziff Associates, L.P. -- Dominic Dunlop Volume-Number: Volume 21, Number 177