SOFT-21 Home: Description of the SOFT-21 seminar.
SOFT-21 Details: Location, Fees, Registration, Information, Lodging
Register for SOFT-21: On-line registration for SOFT-21
About Dr. Voas: Dr. Jeffrey Voas's Biography

Contact information
The SOFT-21 organizers can be contacted by e-mail to soft21@ida.liu.se or directly:

Mariam Kamkar: tel 013-281949
email marka@ida.liu.se
David Byers: tel 013-284496, email davby@ida.liu.se
Bodil Mattson: tel 013-282169
email bodma@ida.liu.se

About SOFT
The SOFT series of workshops and seminars are organized by the Computer and Information Science department at Linköping University. This series of seminars and workshops is part of our effort to promote state-of-the-art software engineering technologies and methodologies and to promote communication and cooperation between the research community and the Swedish software industry.

Previous SOFT seminars have covered software reliability engineering, engineering safety-critical systems and the win-win requirements negotiation system, among many other topics.

SOFT-21 is arranged in association with Dataföreningen i Sverige, Östra kretsen and the ECSEL graduate school.

SOFTWARE ASSURANCE CERTIFICATION: TECHNIQUES AND METHODOLOGIES

Jeffrey Voas, Reliable Software Technologies

Linköping, September 13, 1999

Software assurance certification suffers from a host of misconceptions and unsound practices. For example, certifying software solely based on a set of development process standards is dangerous and misleads consumers into believing that the software is of higher quality than can be justifiably assumed. Employing auditors to visit publisher sites and do process spot checks is also dangerous because auditors are often poorly trained, error prone, and will almost certainly not have enough time to dig into a publishers documentation with any degree of thoroughness. The key to successful software assurance process is a reasonable blend of development processes and product assessment processes. Once this blend is found, the results from the product assessment can easily be fed back into the development process for future projects. The adequate product assessment can be used as a metric to improve the early life-cycle processes as well as assure that a current software product is ready for release.

This day will begin by discussing the state of software quality standards and the current state of software testing. This material will be covered because testing is one of the key ways to certify the quality of software.

Schedule

09:00-10:00	Registration and coffee
10:00-11:00	Software Testing and Standards: Past, Present and Future
11:00-12:00	The Software Certification Triangle
12:00-13:30	Lunch
13:30-14:30	Advanced Certification Techniques (fault injection, inverted operational profiles, interface propagation analysis)
14:30-15:30	Certification of COTS-based systems
15:30-16:00	Afternoon coffee
16:00-17:00	A New Model: User-Participation based software certification
17:00-17:30	Ethics and legal liabilities for certification auditors and agencies
17:30-18:00	Conclusions
18:00-	Buffet dinner