SQGNE meets monthly at 6:15pm on the second Wednesday of the month at Sun Microsystems in Burlington MA. The group provides speakers on topics of interest to software quality professionals.

This site is designed to keep you informed of what is happening within the standards committees. ASQ is charged with administering these committees on behalf of the American National Standards Institute. Our committees can be grouped within four broad technical disciplines: Quality Management, Environmental Management, Dependability, and Statistics.

For all the ISO and ISO 9000 family of standards... including ISO-9000-3 the Guidance document for applying ISO 9001 to software development. (Note: The guidance document is also available from ASQ.)

IEEE Software delivers reliable, useful, leading-edge software development information to keep engineers and managers abreast of rapid technology change. The authority on translating software theory into practice, this award-winning magazine positions itself between pure research and pure practice, transferring ideas, methods, and experiences among researchers and engineers. Peer-reviewed articles, topical interviews, and columns by seasoned practitioners illuminate all aspect of the industry, including process improvement, project management, development tools, software maintenance, Web applications and opportunities, testing, and human factors.

Computer is the place where computing professionals of all disciplines can share their experience, solve problems, and reach consensus. In Computer, practitioners, managers, and researchers can talk to each other in plain language about what works and what doesn't, what resources are available, and what might be next. Computer is the flagship member publication of the IEEE Computer Society.

The Technical Council on Software Engineering taps into the myriad ways that software is created. The TCSE has two overriding aims: to contribute to its members’ professional expertise and to help advance software engineering research and practice.

Better Software magazine is your information source for developing and delivering better software. Each issue focuses on nuts-and-bolts information and practices you can apply to your software projects. You'll benefit from expert analysis and real-world case studies in the areas of Testing, Management & Teams, Tools & Automation, Measurement & Analysis, Process & Techniques, and much more.

STAR East (usually in May) and STAR West (usually in October) provide innovative, yet practical, solutions to software test and evaluation challenges...

John D. Musa

More Reliable Software Faster and Cheaper (Software Reliability Engineering)

Software reliability engineering is a practice that helps you develop software that is more reliable, and helps you develop it faster and cheaper. It is a standard, proven, widespread best practice that is widely applicable to systems that include software. Software reliability engineering is low in cost, and its implementation has virtually no schedule impact.

Software reliability engineering works by quantitatively characterizing and applying two things about the product: the expected relative use of its functions and its required major quality characteristics. The major quality characteristics are reliability, availability, delivery date, and life-cycle cost. In applying software reliability engineering, you can vary the relative emphasis you place on these factors. When you have characterized use, software reliability engineering guides you in substantially increasing development efficiency by focusing resources on functions in proportion to use and criticality. It also maximizes test efficiency by making test highly representative of use in the field. Increased efficiency increases the effective resource pool available to add customer value.

For further information, contact John Musa