I have been looking for some formal definitons but could not find any IEEE newer than 610, which is from 1990. Could you help me please?
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Like Mat says in his comment, IEEE Standard 610-1990 has been withdrawn (effective April 20, 2001), which means that it is no longer maintained and the information may be obsolete or erroneous.
Although it’s more than just a glossary of terms, the Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (free HTML format, paid PDF and dead-tree format) typically provides formal definitions for terms that relate to each knowledge area that come from widely accepted publications. However, this document does cite IEEE 610-1990 for some definitions. I would assume that even though 610-1990 might contain obsolete information, the selected definitions that come from this document are still valid (especially considering the final publication of the SWEBOK was 3 years about 610-1990 was withdrawn, which is sufficient time to update anything that could be considered obsolete).
Yes, there is a better “IEEE glossary” than IEEE 610-1990. It’s ISO/IEC/IEEE 24765:2010 Systems and software engineering — Vocabulary. It can be accessed through the IEEE Computer Society for free.
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