It seems to me that those participating in development of a standard would be predisposed to standardization - believe that a standard on a given topic is appropriate. It also seems to me that the converse is true - that those who object to the existance of a standard would not be predisposed to participating.

Many of the objections raised to ISO29119 do not relate to it's content, but to its existance. For example, 1) the silliness of standardizing the response to variable / unpredictable demand (standardize the finding of bugs when the writing of them sure isn't standardize?) 2) testing being a young disciple which we are all still learning about, and the threat that standardization poses to further innovation 3) the opportunity cost represented by following a compliance driven, document and process heavy approach, and the correponding harm to test efficiency, effectiveness and ultimately to software quality.

Why should those who oppose the standard's very existance on such grounds partipate in its design, and negotiation as to its content? That's kinda like saying "I don't beleive in beating kids, so I'm going to help write the standard on how to administer corporal punishment in schools".

I don't argue that /you can't have a standard/. Clearly you can. ISO have written one. It's a fact. What I /would/ argue is that standardizing a response to something that is highly variable is a fool's errand. "Introducing defects" isn't standardized, why should their detection be?

In RL plenty of organizations spend time and money on compliance in the hope that doing so will magically improve quality, and that those improvements will translate into business results. Evidence that this is the case is scant. The ISO 9000 series is probably the closest analogue here, in that it too is a compliance oriented standard focussed on process and documentation. The handful of longitudical studies that claim a relationship between compliance and business results have been widely challenged. Compliance != Quality.

Competence in what? Establishing document bureaucracies? Proceeding through steps 1 to 10 of a process so generic as to be meaningless? Checking boxes to satisfy the auditor? These are things that 29119 deals in, with scant testing to be seen. Perhaps you are right, perhaps compliance does establish competence, but in this case, in all the wrong things.