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.

 Programming language Ruby became an international standard in April, 2012.
 Ruby invented and developed in Japan (see p.18), is widely used in many information systems.
 In order to establish an environment that enables people to use Ruby, with confidence of long-term availability, for a variety of applications including enterprise mission-critical systems, IPA had been moving ahead with standardization of the programming language Ruby.
 IPA had been creating the written Ruby language specification in collaboration with worldwide Ruby community and experts of standards.  The resulting specification was approved and published as ISO/IEC 30170:2012.