Symposium: The Business Model of Product and Process Assurance
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Leaders: Jairus Hihn, Tim Menzies, Yuko Miyamoto, Haruka Nakao, Dan
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There is little doubt on the necessity and value of assurance activities such as software quality assurance (SQA), verification and validation (V&V), and capability maturity (CM). However, as with any business activity, assurance incurs cost, a cost for which a healthy return on investment is expected. At least the activity needs to prove cost-effective. There have been very few attempts to assess the relative cost-effectiveness of the broad range of technology product and process assurance methods empirically. This raises a number of important technology management questions including:
* What is the “right” amount of assurance to perform?
* How can the benefit of assurance be measured and assessed?
* Is it more cost-effective to perform assurance on a per-project basis, or as an institutionalized effort balanced applied across an organization?
* Measuring the impact of process improvement?
* Improving software quality through effective use of metrics
* How do you create an effective measurement program?
* What is the business case for assurance?
* How can the quality of assurance be assured?
* What is the balance of effort of assurance and effort of the other activities?
* How do the domain specific factors affect the benefit and the effort of assurance?
* What should we do for verification and validation for software software product?
* How do we know the quality of the assurance activity?
We seek position papers on the following suggested topics:
* Determining appropriate amount of assurance
* ROI for assurance
* Assessing value of assurance
* Automated versus non-automated quality metrics collection
* Economics of assurance
* Validation of assurance methods
* Cost-effectiveness of assurance techniques
* Business case for assurance
* Interplay of assurance and risk management
* A ssurance Metrics
* Certification of assurance
* Certification of assurance practitioners
* Assurance cost and effort estimation
* Assurance standards
* Management of assurance
* Dealing with uncertainty in assurance assessments
* Use and abuse of historical data
* Need and rationale for assurance
* Training of assurance personal
* Model driven assurance
Each designated participant agrees to bring a "working paper" of ideas, arguments, tools, software, case studies, etc. - anything that contributes to the explanation, development, and articulation of the topic. This can be as long as a regular paper (10 pages), but not shorter than 5 printed pages. Ideally, these papers are prepared in advance, to be posted on the conference website to be examined by participants before the conference. Since not everyone has access to the web during the conference, each designated participant should bring at least a dozen paper copies.
Please submit papers for this symposium to dport@hawaii.edu.
Submissions will be reviewed by organizers for relevance to symposia audience. Authors of accepted papers will be expected to provide brief background presentations (10 mins) on their positions to facilitate later discussion. The working session will focus on addressing positions and produce a monograph containing the collected position papers, presentations, and symposium commentary from the participants. This monograph will be posted on the HICSS web site http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/Reports.htm
Jairus Hihn ( jhihn@jpl.nasa.gov ) is a Principal Member of the Engineering staff at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and is currently the manager for the Software Quality Improvement Projects Measurement Estimation and Analysis Element, which is establishing a laboratory wide software metrics and software estimation program at JPL. MEsA's objective is to enable the emergence of a quantitative software management culture at JPL. He has a PhD in Economics from the University of Maryland. He has been developing estimation models and providing software and mission level cost estimation support to JPL's Deep Space Network and flight projects since 1988. Dr. Hihn has extensive experience in simulation and Monte Carlo methods with applications in the areas of decision analysis, institutional change, R&D project selection cost modeling, and process models.
Tim Menzies (tim@menzies.us ) is Associate Professor at the Lane Department of Computer Science at the University of West Virginia (USA), and has been working with NASA on software quality issues since 1998. His recent research concerns modeling and learning with a particular focus on light-weight modeling methods. His doctoral research aimed at improving the validation of possibly inconsistent, knowledge-based systems in the QMOD specification language. He also has worked as an object-oriented consultant in industry and has authored over 150 publications and served on numerous conference and workshop programs and well as guest editor of journal special issues.
Yuko Miyamoto (miyamoto.yuko@jaxa.jp ) is with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
Haruka Nakao (harukanakao@yahoo.co.jp) is with the Japan Manned Space Systems Corporation (JAMSSS). Her main empirical research areas include Strategic COTS IV&V for real space project and Strategic and Economic Methods for Assessment for IV&V activities.
Dan Port ( dport@hawaii.edu ) is an Associate Professor of Information Technology Management at the University of Hawaii's Shidler College of Business and a Visiting Associate at the Center for Software and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California. His research focuses on strategic planning and assessment of software assurance activities, strategic software engineering, empirical software engineering, and software engineering education. Daniel attended UCLA and graduated with a degree in Mathematics and later received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He does not own any aloha shirts.