Tracie Berardi, Program Manager, CISQ

SPICON is an annual conference organized by the Chennai chapter of Software Systems Process Improvement Network (SPIN). An international forum that promotes various high-maturity quality and management practices, processes, frameworks and models, SPICON attracts thought leaders in software and systems process improvement from around the globe.

This year’s conference theme was "Agile, Automation, and Cloudification for Business Transformation.” CISQ™ was represented by Founding Executive Director, Dr. Bill Curtis, current Executive Director, David Norton and Hariharan Mathrubutham, Vice President of Delivery Excellence at Cognizant, a CISQ Governing Board Member and participant on the SPICON Steering Committee.

Dr. Curtis presented Beyond Process: A Challenge for SPINS, an overview of the history of CISQ, its partners and sponsors and the latest iteration of its software quality measures. Recently approved as international Object Management Group® standards, the CISQ measures fill a critical void since there are no other standards for automating the measurement of size and quality from the source code of a software system. The CISQ standard measures help businesses assess the productivity and structural quality of their software systems and can be used as pre-release indicators of operational or cost-of-ownership risks.

David Norton, current CISQ Executive Director, took a different approach in his IT Software Risk: Don’t Hesitate: Automate presentation. He covered factors driving IT automation, cultural and behavioral drivers to introduce more automation into software development and the role that standards play.

Both presentations highlighted the CISQ Trustworthy Systems Manifesto. The Manifesto states 5 principles that corporate executives and risk officers should expect their software development and maintenance staff to embrace.  Each principle is elaborated with guidance written to aid non-IT executives in communicating their expectations. If executives track how IT is implementing these principles, they have evidence that they are addressing a critical source of risk and thereby executing their governance responsibilities. CISQ is encouraging executives to sign the manifesto and use it to discuss risk management with those responsible for corporate software-intensive systems regardless of whether they are IT applications or product software.