A Survey on the status of Marine IT Industrial environment for e-navigation SQA – focusing on Korean domestic companies

According to Software Quality Assurance (SQA) and the Human Centred Design (HCD) guidelines for e-navigation by Maritime Safety Committee of International Maritime Organization, software quality related activities and practices will be in demand in the maritime field. To provide high quality software and a usable system to users, e-navigation SQA is supported by Republic of Korea. After merging with the HCD as suggested by Australia, it has been endorsed as IMO Circ.1512 in June 2015.

To apply SQA to the maritime industry, it needs to achieve the current status of maritime software related industries. This article introduces the IMO Circ.1512 and the progress of e-navigation SQA so far including the international workshop held in Busan, Korea as previous accomplishments. Also, the result of a survey on the status of software quality management of the Korean domestic maritime IT related industry will be described. The purpose of survey is to find out how SQA is dealt with in domestic industry, what experiences the industry have had so far and what software project related issues they have.

The questionnaire is composed of two parts. The first part mainly deals with fundamental knowledge about the scale of the company and the number of development teams s. The second part consists of three sub-parts with Quality Management, Configuration Management, and Process Management. Otherwise, several questions are surveyed with respect to engineering tools for SQA and education support. Approximately 150 cases were gathered. The outcome of the survey shows some points that both of industry and government can contemplate for the future.