Contracts for Engineers

9

Standards, Codes, and Regulations

Introduction

A standard may be thought of as a multiparty contract that is developed by a process similar to contract negotiation. What is a standard? There are more definitions of the term standard than there are authors who write about them! As a result, there is some understandable confusion on the part of newcomers to the field as to the definition of the term. One of the authoritative definitions comes from the Definitions in Subpart 2.1 of the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR), introduced in Chapter 3:

“Voluntary consensus standards” means common and repeated use of rules, conditions, guidelines or characteristics for products, or related processes and production methods and related management ...