April 27, 2011
This afternoon the world's first five-star software product certificate was awarded to Amsterdam-based company the RIPE Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC).

The General Manager of the German certification institute TÜV Informationstechnik GmbH (TÜViT), Mr. Sommer, was on hand to present the certificate to Andrew de la Haye, the COO of the RIPE NCC.

Andrew de la Haye explains: “We’re proud that SIG's Software Product Evaluation of our resource certification service has recognised the high level of quality embedded within the source code. Current and future users can be confident that they can entrust the RIPE NCC with running the certification service and acting as Trust Anchor.”

“We launched resource certification in January this year as part of our ongoing aim to ensure the long-term stability of Internet routing. The digital verification provided by resource certification helps secure Internet routing by facilitating automated checking of resource registration information in a dependable, transparent and standardised way, reducing the risk of mis-announcements of IP address prefixes.”

                       Left: Mr Sommer (TÜViT), right: Mr De La Haye (RIPE NCC).

The higher the quality of the software, the lower the development and management costs
The star levels of the SIG/TÜViT quality model are based on the relative position of software systems in a benchmark of hundreds of software products. A five-star rating places the system among the top 5% of these software products (see table). In the case of five-star systems, the productivity of developers and maintenance programmers is twice as high as in the case of average-quality, three-star systems (see table). In view of the fact that the costs of building a software system, as well as maintaining one, can run to extremely high amounts during the years in which it is in production, early control in terms of software quality can lead to significant savings in costs.

                   Image: Overview software product quality versus productivity.

About the certificate
The certificate was developed by SIG in collaboration with TÜViT and is specifically geared towards demonstrating the technical quality of software systems in line with ISO 9126 and a number of evaluation criteria derived from this. Software of a high degree of technical quality leads to: reduction in costs of ownership, reduction of management risks and primarily keeping software systems easily adaptable, enabling new user wishes to be fulfilled. In addition, the certificate offers a clear benchmark for establishing clear agreements between clients and suppliers in the IT industry.

Anyone interested can view the software product certificates issued to date and download these at:
http://www.tuvit.de/eng/certification-overview-1265_trusted-product-maintainability-certificates-1339_ENX_HTML.htm