The ISO 9000:2000 standard is based on the following eight principles:

Principle 1$\rightarrow$Customer Focus: Success of an organization is highly dependent on satisfying the customers. An organization must understand its customers and their needs on a continued basis. Understanding the customers helps in understanding and meeting their requirements. It is not enough to just meet customer requirements. Rather, organizations must make an effort to exceed customer expectations. By understanding the customers, one can have a better understanding of their real needs and their unstated expectations. People in different departments of an organization, such as marketing, software development, testing, and customer support, must capture the same view of the customers and their requirements. An example of customer focus is to understand how they are going to use a system. By accurately understating how customers are going to use a system, one can produce a better user profile.

Principle 2$\rightarrow$Leadership: Leaders set the direction their organization should take, and they must effectively communicate this to all the people involved in the process. All the people in an organization must have a coherent view of the organizational direction. Without a good understanding of the organizational direction, employees will find it difficult to know where they are heading. Leaders must set challenging but realistic goals and objectives. Employee contribution should be recognized by the leaders. Leaders create a positive environment and provide support for the employees to collectively realize the organizational goal. They reevaluate their goals on a continual basis and communicate the findings to the staff.

Principle 3$\rightarrow$Involvement of People: In general, organizations rely on people. People are informed of the organizational direction, and they are involved at all levels of decision making. People are given an opportunity to develop their strength and use their abilities. People are encouraged to be creative in performing their tasks.

Principle 4$\rightarrow$Process Approach: There are several advantages to performing major tasks by using the concept of process. A process is a sequence of activities that transform inputs to outputs. Organizations can prepare a plan in the form of allocating resources and scheduling the activities by making the process defined, repeatable, and measurable. Consequently, the organization becomes efficient and effective. Continuous improvement in processes leads to improvement in efficiency and effectiveness.

Principle 5$\rightarrow$System Approach to Management: A system is an interacting set of processes. A whole organization can be viewed as a system of interacting processes. In the context of software development, we can identify a number of processes. For example, gathering customer requirements for a project is a distinct process involving specialized skills. Similarly, designing a functional specification by taking the requirements as input is another distinct process. There are simultaneous and sequential processes being executed in an organization. At any time, people are involved in one or more processes. A process is affected by the outcome of some other processes, and, in turn, it affects some other processes in the organization. It is important to understand the overall goal of the organization and the individual subgoals associated with each process. For an organization as a whole to succeed in terms of effectiveness and efficiency, the interactions among processes must be identified and analyzed.

Principle 6$\rightarrow$Continual Improvement: Continual improvement means that the processes involved in developing, say, software products are reviewed on a periodic basis to identify where and how further improvements in the processes can be effected. Since no process can be a perfect one to begin with, continual improvement plays an important role in the success of organizations. Since there are independent changes in many areas, such as customer views and technologies, it is natural to review the processes and seek improvements. Continual process improvements result in lower cost of production and maintenance. Moreover, continual improvements lead to less differences between the expected behavior and actual behavior of products. Organizations need to develop their own policies regarding when to start a process review and identify the goals of the review.

Principle 7$\rightarrow$Factual Approach to Decision Making: Decisions may be made based on facts, experience, and intuition. Facts can be gathered by using a sound measurement process. Identification and quantification of parameters are central to measurement. Once elements are quantified, it becomes easier to establish methods to measure those elements. There is a need for methods to validate the measured data and make the data available to those who need it. The measured data should be accurate and reliable. A quantitative measurement program helps organizations know how much improvement has been achieved due to a process improvement.

Principle 8$\rightarrow$Mutually Beneficial Supplier Relationships: Organizations rarely make all the components they use in their products. It is a common practice for organizations to procure components and subsystems from third parties. An organization must carefully choose the suppliers and make them aware of the organization’s needs and expectations. The performance of the products procured from outside should be evaluated, and the need to improve their products and processes should be communicated to the suppliers. A mutually beneficial, cooperative relationship should be maintained with the suppliers.