An overview of guidance documents for software in metrological applications

The quality characteristics of metrological software are required by national or regional legislation, e.g., in legal metrology, or for safety critical applications, or by various standards such as software product quality standards (ISO/IEC 91261) or laboratory competence standards (ISO/IEC 170252).The parties involved are interested in getting a clear guidance for software quality requirements and validation methods. In already developed guidance documents different software quality issues, software lifecycle phases and consequences of risk evaluation for software malfunction or fraud are addressed to different extents.This paper provides a comparison of approaches with the aim to support the parties involved in understanding both the common points and the differences.