Press Release

NEEDHAM, MA – NOVEMBER 18, 2019 – The Consortium for Information and Software Quality™ (CISQ™), an IT industry leadership group that develops standards for automating software quality measurement, today announced a call for participation to help it create a new specification to address software quality within model-based systems engineering (MBSE): Quality Measures for MBSE.

There is no current standard that enables enterprises, like automotive and aerospace manufacturers, to analyze the software model during the early design phase.  The earlier that systems engineers can detect common vulnerabilities and weaknesses in a model the less expensive and risky to repair. 

“We need to start this standard now as the use of MBSE is expanding. It’s a tried and tested approach in aerospace and automotive industries, but now we see MBSE being used in healthcare, finance, and logistics. MBSE is also the cornerstone for solutions based on IoT and digital twin technology.  We believe MBSE and this related quality initiative will help with the software quality aspects of MBSE developed systems, and improve reliability, performance and security,” said CISQ Executive Director Dave Norton.  “For example, it would be easy to miss that a car’s Mobile Wireless Gateway had a memory leak.  If an automotive manufacturer deployed two million of those Gateways, there would be a huge impact to their operational performance and connected applications.”

Many standards exist during the coding stage, but this new standard is designed to detect software quality errors within the model, not the code.  Since not every model generates code, vulnerabilities cannot be detected until they are in fully deployed solutions.  A software model could be systematically correct but still contain vulnerabilities.  The proposed Quality Measures for MBSE standard would allow users to analyze that model for quality aspects.

Companies interested in participating in the development of this standard can learn more at https://www.it-cisq.org/quality-measures-for-mbse.

About CISQ

The Consortium for Information and Software Quality™ (CISQ™) is an industry leadership group that develops international standards for automating the measurement of software size and structural quality from the source code. The standards, written by CISQ, enable organizations developing or acquiring software-intensive systems to measure the operational risk software poses to the business, as well as estimate the cost of ownership. CISQ was co-founded by the Object Management Group® (OMG®) and Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University. For more information, visit https://www.it-cisq.org/.