Overview
CISQ: Open-Source Standards for Measuring Software Risk and Quality
The Consortium for Information & Software Quality™ (CISQ™), co-founded by Object Management Group and the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University in 2010, develops open-source, freely available standards that assess and mitigate software risk. Our standards focus on automating the measurement of software size, structural quality, reliability, and security from source code.
By adopting CISQ standards, organizations can accurately measure the operational risks software poses to their business and estimate the cost of ownership, helping to ensure safer, more reliable software.
Our History: Building Standards for the Future of Software Quality
CISQ was born out of a need from system integrators to develop standards for reliability and security in software, which were becoming key metrics in outsourcing contracts and IT development. At that time, customers faced inconsistent definitions of these metrics, making benchmarking and comparing software quality challenging.
To solve this, OMG and SEI co-founded CISQ in 2010, providing open-source standards that enable the detection and mitigation of software risks.
CISQ Goals:
- Automate Software Quality Measurement: Develop standards that enable automated, scalable measurement of software quality.
- Promote Secure, Reliable, and Trustworthy Software: Advocate for high-quality software that is resilient and reliable
- Define Industry Standards: Create clear and consistent definitions of software quality characteristics like reliability, security, performance efficiency, and maintainability.
- Educate and Evolve Standards: Drive the adoption of software quality standards through ongoing education, refinement, and implementation support.
CISQ Mission
CISQ’s mission is to develop international standards that automate software quality measurement and promote the development of secure, reliable, and trustworthy software. Our standards, including software size, structural quality, and technical debt, help organizations measure and improve their software across industries, reducing operational risks and ensuring software reliability and security.
CISQ Standards
CISQ collaborates with top software engineering experts to create open-source software standards, broken down into four essential characteristics:
- Reliability
- Security
- Performance Efficiency
- Maintainability
These standards are free for anyone to use, enabling developers, businesses, and organizations to measure and improve their software quality.
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.
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.
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.
Want to know where software modernization and security are headed?
JOIN THE EXPERTS AND HELP DRIVE THE ADOPTION OF INTERNATIONAL SOFTWARE STANDARDS!
Founders & Sponsors
