Overview

CISQ provides open-source, freely available standards that measure software risk.

The Consortium for Information & Software Quality™ (CISQ™) was co-founded by OMG and the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in 2010. The organization collaborates with the world's top software engineering experts to create standards for automating the measurement of software size and structural quality from the source code. CISQ standards enable organizations developing or acquiring software-intensive systems to measure the operational risk software poses to the business and estimate the cost of ownership.

Our History

OMG SEI
OMG and the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University were approached by system integrators and asked to develop standards for measuring the software attributes of reliability and security, as these were starting to appear in development and outsourcing contracts as the equivalent of service level agreements and every customer had a different definition for measurement. Establishing a global standard was an important step for enabling these measures to be used in acquiring IT applications from suppliers or for apples-to-apples comparison in benchmarking applications. They co-founded CISQ in 2010 to provide open-source standards that can detect and mitigate risk in software.

CISQ's goals are to:

  • Develop standards that automate software quality measurement
  • Promote and sustain secure, reliable, and trustworthy software
  • Share insight into software standards development
  • Create cross-industry software quality weaknesses and definitions
  • Educate, evolve, and refine software standard deployment and adoption
Our Goals

CISQ Mission

The mission of the Consortium for Information & Software Quality™ (CISQ™) is to develop international standards to automate software quality measurement and to promote the development and sustainment of secure, reliable, and trustworthy software. Through the work of CISQ, industry-supported standards have been developed to measure software size, structural quality, and technical debt from source code. These standards are implemented in tools used by organizations across private industry, government entities, not-for-profits, and academia to advance software and information quality when contracting for, developing, testing, accepting, securing, and deploying enterprise IT and embedded systems.

CISQ Standards

CISQ collaborates with the world's top software engineering experts to provide an open-source, freely available set of software coding standards, broken into four characteristics: Reliability, Security, Performance Efficiency, and Maintainability. CISQ software standards are free and available for anyone to use.

Software Sizing Standards

This standard is used to estimate the size of a software application or component to support cost estimating, progress tracking, and other software project management activities. Read more

ISO 5055

The new standard measures the internal, structural quality of software based on detecting and counting weaknesses in security, reliability, performance efficiency, and maintainability. These factors are critical to measuring how trustworthy, dependable, and resilient a software system will be. Read more

Technical Debt Standard

The Automated Technical Debt standard estimates the effort to correct all instances of the software weaknesses included in the CISQ code quality standards that remain in a software application's code at release. This estimate can be used to predict future corrective maintenance costs. Read more

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Active Projects

Sponsors of CISQ participate in the development of standards. Sponsorship of CISQ signals a commitment to the development of software and software-intensive systems that are secure, resilient, and trustworthy. Three standard development initiatives are underway, and we are seeking participation from enterprises, government agencies, universities, suppliers, and vendors engaged in:

Founders & Sponsors

OMG

SEI

CAST

Puppet

Software Improvement Group

Synopsys


Our Partners