The Consortium of IT Software Quality (CISQ) today announced the release of its standard measures for evaluating and benchmarking the Reliability, Security, Performance Efficiency, and Maintainability of IT software. CISQ is a Special Interest Group of the Object Management Group (OMG) established as an industry-led initiative to improve software risk management and software acquisition practices by measuring the structural soundness of business-critical IT software.

The 24 founding members of CISQ included OMG, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), large system integrators, IT organizations within Fortune 200 companies, and vendors providing software quality technology and services. The CISQ measurement standards released today were developed by measurement experts from CISQ member companies.

CISQ was launched in meetings with IT executives from Global 2000 organizations to jointly address the challenge of standardizing measures of structural quality in IT software and to promote a market-based ecosystem to support their deployment. In those meetings the IT executives set their priorities on structural quality measures for Reliability, Security, Performance, and Maintainability. Today’s release of definitions creates an industry standard that provides the detail necessary to automate the measurement of non-functional, structural quality attributes.

"CISQ has seen tremendous engagement from industry practitioners and thought leaders in getting the software quality measurement standards to this point,” said Dr. Bill Curtis, CISQ Director. “From this point on we will be focused on deploying the standards with a broader audience and providing IT organizations with methods for implementing structural software measurement in their processes. These measures are especially important for governing and reducing the business risk of software acquired from external sources.”

General membership to CISQ has become free and subscribers will receive access to all CISQ content. Organizations that choose to sponsor CISQ will have the opportunity to influence the direction of future standards and influence how structural quality standards are communicated.

About OMG

OMG^® is an international, open membership, not-for-profit computer industry standards consortium. OMG Task Forces develop enterprise integration standards for a wide range of technologies and an even wider range of industries. OMG’s modeling standards enable powerful visual design, execution and maintenance of software and other processes. For more information, visit www.omg.org.

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