In collaboration with leading overseas organizations that conduct advanced IT research, IPA is making efforts to spread the use of outstanding software engineering methods from other countries to Japan. Through these activities, IPA aims to provide mainly SMEs with the opportunity to introduce new business tools and improve international competitiveness.

 IPA has signed mutual recognition agreements for the ITEE (see P.11) since 2011 with eleven countries and economies listed below. With this recognition agreement, each country . including Japan . can evaluate their engineers using common criteria, and a smooth exchange of human resources across borders is expected when engineers look for employment in overseas enterprise or when IT enterprises hire local engineers.
 IPA also has proactively made efforts to introduce and support the IT Skill Standards (ITSS, see P.11) in Asian countries.

*ITEE mutual recognition agreement countries and economies India, Singapore, Korea, China, the Philippines, Thailand, Viet Nam, Myanmar, Malaysia, Taiwan and Mongolia Under JIS X 3017 Programming language Ruby, the technology can be used with confi dence of long-term availability.
By being international standard (ISO), the use of Ruby is expected to spread to the world and to become a popular programming language.

 Ruby, a programming language invented and developed in Japan (see p.18), is widely used in many information systems. IPA had been actively pushing for the Ruby specifications to become the Japanese Industry Standard (JIS).
 As a result, JIS X 3017 Programming language Ruby was registered in 2011. IPA is now working to make it the international standard as the next stage.