International Software Quality Conference Comes to Denver

Lakewood, just outside Denver, is hosting the International Conference on Software Quality this month, a gathering of professionals who not only need to understand the software development process, but also how to keep it on track and improving, so that the end product is not only innovative and useful, but reliable and effective.

In a field where innovation is highly competitive, software quality sometimes doesn't receive the emphasis that software development does. Most of us are familiar with the consequences, from nationwide outages on the Blackberry service, to problems with software on our desktops or at the companies that provide services to us. While it's popular to "blame the computer," sometimes it's also accurate.

The American Society for Quality (ASQ) is presenting the conference, which "provides a forum for individuals and organizations seeking technologies, concepts, and techniques to improve the quality of their software products, processes, and services" and also allows them to wander into Denver and hang out and have a beer in Denver's famous LoDo (or head out to Golden, Coors country), while sharing experiences and insights.

The conference will focus in four areas: Agile methods, process improvement, metrics and measurement, and standards. This is a long way from the early days of software, when so-called "functional testing" was the basis for software quality, basically "whether it works or not." Today, Agile development is employed, a relatively new technology, where products are developed like sculptures, bit by bit with a vision in mind, instead of being "cast in stone" at the beginning of development.

Process improvement involves seeing what actually works in the process of software development, and engineering it so that it can be formalized and documented, and performing research to develop insights into potential improvements. Metrics provide data both for researchers and the developers themselves, as well as to software quality professionals who can gauge the effectiveness of the software development effort, and point out potential improvements in process, design, and elsewhere.

Standards make software skills portable from company to company, and improve the effectiveness of education of software engineers, but giving the industry a common base to work from, as well as giving customers a good idea of what is going into the software they are ordering.

Certification Exams will also be offered, as the software field provides more and more ways to address the key issues in software development - the time it takes to produce it, and the quality of the results. While solving complex problems in software is still a very creative endeavor, the process of producing software is becoming more formalized so the remaining issues are related to innovation, not "bug fixing."

Many of the processes and technologies being addressed at the ASQ conference may also provide insights to other industries. Quality, they say, is a job that is never done.

http://www.asq.org/conferences/software-icsq-2007/index.html