Time to say something about the software quality effort recently started at OMG, and mix in another travel Excellent Adventure, this one along with our own intrepid Vice President of Business Development, Ken Berk. Ken and I spent a few days in Paris in mid-February—OK, I know it’s been a month, but it was a fascinating trip and well worth mentioning some aspects. And it didn’t hurt that Paris is a magnificently beautiful city, despite the horror of La Défense rising outside Porte Maillot.
Most of our focus for this trip was on growing the aforementioned software quality effort. The core idea for this effort came from two places almost simultaneously—it was first and foremost a natural outgrowth of our legacy modernization efforts (also called Architecture-Driven Modernization, see http://adm.omg.org/) and the very active Software & Systems Assurance standardization efforts. Once you have in place standards for connecting code-recognizing systems and storing the recovered models of those codes (that is, the OMG Knowledge Definition Metamodel) it makes sense to see what else you can do with that reconstructed or recovered model. Static code quality analysis follows quite naturally from code modernization and assurance.
Equal to that essentially “bottom-up” reason was a critically important “top-down” one: the enormous and growing need for static code quality analysis in support of software development outsourcing and off-shoring. Not only do buyers want to get code of known, measurable, repeatable quality; but also, outsourcers and off-shorers want a consistent way to contract for development (and not coincidentally, show off their superior abilities to deliver high-quality systems). Already most outsourcing and off-shoring contracts include some kind of static code quality metric, but the proliferation of such measures helps no one. Obviously a standard would lower costs (and likely improve quality) across the board. A sufficiently widely recognized code quality metric might even someday have an effect on the packaged software market—though that is not the focus of our efforts.
As always in a new OMG effort, OMG staff is deeply involved in bringing together both likely vendors and likely users of a quality standard. In this instance we’re even helping manage a group of submitters (called the Consortium for IT Software Quality, or CISQ) work together to submit to an OMG RFP that is being discussed even as I type these words. Both OMG and the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University are sponsoring CISQ.
Anyway, back to the Paris visit. We bracketed many other shorter visits and teleconferences with visits to a static code quality analysis vendor and a likely major user. CAST Software is providing the Director of CISQ in the person of its Chief Scientist Bill Curtis (long-time OMGers will recognize Bill from his participation in the standardization of the Business Process Maturity Model, BPMM, and others may recognize his name from the development of the Capability Maturity Model). Our visit to CAST impressed us with the depth and breadth of their commitment to software quality standardization—they already have products in the area, and are committed to conformance with a standard that doesn’t even exist yet. We were even more impressed with a wonderful lunch to which CAST’s Executive Vice President Gérard Karsenti treated us, at L'Escarbille in Meudon.
At the other end of the spectrum, we had the opportunity to
meet with Anne-Sophie Luce at AXA Group headquarters in Paris 8. Anne-Sophie is
responsible for governance and performance of IT projects across AXA’s
worldwide insurance systems, leaving her with an enormous need to bring down
the cost of systems while increasing quality—and obviously, a quality standard
for code (and not just process) will be part of that equation. AXA was one of
the first to sign up to CISQ and the OMG’s software quality efforts, and her
clear and focused requirements will be invaluable to the process. And it
probably doesn’t hurt that she spent years at THALES, an OMG Contributing
member of many years, where she was quite aware of (and supportive of) OMG
standardization efforts!
In any case, an excuse to visit Paris is always welcome—but to do so with a clear focus on an exciting new OMG standardization effort is even better!
Richard Soley & Anne-Sophie Luce in the the atrium
of AXA Group headquarters in Paris.
Richard Soley (left) and Gérard Karsenti (right) at
L'Escarbille Restaurant in Meudon.
