Software engineering support activities for very small entities

The emerging ISO/IEC 29110 standard Lifecycle profiles for Very Small Entities has at its core a Management and Engineering Guides which is targeted at very small entity (enterprise, organization, department or project) having up to 25 people, to assist them unlock the potential benefits of using standards which are specifically designed to address there needs. The developers of the standard, ISO/IEC JCT1/SC7 Working Group 24 (WG24), recommend the use of pilot projects as a mean to trial the adoption of the new International standard in small organisations. Accordingly an ISO/IEC 29110 pilot project has been established between the Software Engineering group of Brest University and a 14 person company with the aim of establishing an engineering discipline for a new web-based project. This paper details the lessons learned from the pilot project and based on our experiences with using ISO/IEC 29110 we identify a potential deficiency and accordingly propose new process area, “Infrastructure and Support” for include in the future evolution of ISO/IEC 29110 Process Profiles.