Tag: CISQ

On March 15, CISQ hosted the Cyber Resilience Summit in Washington, D.C., bringing together nearly 200 IT innovators, standards experts, U.S. Federal Government leaders and attendees from private industry. The CISQ quality measures have been instrumental in guiding software development and IT organization leaders concerned with the overall security, IT risk management and performance of their technology. It was invigorating to be amongst like-minded professionals who see the value in standardizing performance measurement.

Software risks to the business, specifically Application Resiliency, headline a recent executive roundtable hosted by CAST and sponsored by IBM Italy, ZeroUno and the Boston Consulting Group.  European IT executives from the financial services industry assembled to debate the importance of mitigating software risks to their business.

Southwest Airlines is the latest victim of the airline scandal. What scandal? It’s the one where airlines continue to cause travel delays due to poorly managed IT systems. It’s the one that caused Southwest to delay 836 flights on Monday and distribute HAND written tickets to passengers because of a ‘software glitch’. Southwest isn’t alone. United Airlines grounded hundreds of flights in July and American Airlines did the same in September and April. How long will consumers have to wait before these organizations figure out that the glitches are caused by bad software quality, which creates bad service?

If you read the news these days, one would think that software security is something that is layered on top of existing software systems. The truth is, however, that software security needs to be woven into the very fabric of every system and this begins with eliminating vulnerabilities by measuring software quality as the system is built.

During the CAST Software Quality Fall Users Group, Dr. Carol Woody, PhD, senior member of the technical staff at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University, whose research focuses on cyber security engineering, discussed the importance of software quality as a basis for security.

The Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ), will host an IT Risk Management and Cybersecurity Summit on March 24 at the OMG Technical Meeting at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Reston, VA. The CISQ IT Risk Management and Cybersecurity Summit will address issues impacting software quality in the Federal sector, including: Managing Risk in IT Acquisition, Targeting Security Weakness, Complying with Legislative Mandates, Using CISQ Standards to Measure Software Quality, and Agency Implementation Best Practices.

In this post, we wanted to take a step back and break down exactly what a function point is and how an IT organization can use them to measure application development productivity, improve IT project planning and estimating, and better manage application service providers.

The current state of outsourced application development is a sorry state of affairs because of myriad software quality issues causing unprecedented glitches and crashes. It’s not that all outsourcers are making terrible software, rather, it’s that governments and organizations have no way of accurately measuring the performance, robustness, security, risk, and structural quality of the applications once they’ve been handed the keys.

While working in a CISQ technical work group to propose the "best" quality model that would efficiently provide visibility on application quality (mostly to ensure their reliance, performance, and security), we discussed two approaches that would output exposure. The first is a remediation cost approach, which measures the distance to the required internal quality level. The other is a risk level approach, which estimates the impact internal quality issues can have on the business.