Press Release

NEEDHAM, MA – January 29, 2019 – For the first time, the Consortium for Information & Software Quality™ (CISQ™), an IT industry leadership group that develops standards for automating software quality measurement, is partnering with one of the country’s leading private research universities. CISQ today announced that the University of Southern California (USC) has signed on as the Consortium’s first academic sponsor.  A global center for arts, technology, and international business, USC joins the other CISQ sponsors to advance the adoption of software quality standards in the IT industry.

Dr. Barry Boehm, who is the USC Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, Industrial and Systems Engineering, and Astronautics, will also join the CISQ Governing Board to help drive the strategic direction of the Consortium. Dr. Boehm is the TRW Professor of Software Engineering and Founding Director of the USC Center for Systems and Software Engineering.  He is also the Chief Scientist of the DoD-Stevens-USC Systems Engineering Research Center and a part-time employee of the Aerospace Corp.  He received his B.A. degree from Harvard in 1957, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from UCLA in 1961 and 1964, all in Mathematics. He has also received an honorary Sc.D. in Computer Science from the U. of Massachusetts in 2000 and in Software Engineering from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2011.

According to Dr. Boehm, “I’ve been impressed with CISQ’s influence in systems and software qualities, both in getting them more emphasized in systems engineering, development, acquisition, and life cycle management. USC is a partner with the Stevens Institute in leading the DoD Systems Engineering Research Center, where I’ve been the Chief Scientist and leader of a 5-year, 8-university project: Systems Qualities, Ontology, Tradespace, and Affordability, which identified Maintainability as a key to several other qualities, and Technical Debt as a key to improving maintainability, where we also found CAST and CISQ as leaders. I am looking forward to working within CISQ on these critical issues.”

Dr. Bill Curtis, CISQ Executive Director said, “CISQ is honored to welcome one of the world’s preeminent software engineering research centers, the Center for Systems and Software Engineering at the University of Southern California, as a sponsor. Prof. Barry Boehm has been a major contributor to the development of software engineering since its beginning in 1968. His insights and collaboration will be important for guiding CISQ’s future standards work.”

For more information about CISQ sponsorship, please visit: https://it-cisq.org/become-a-sponsor/.

About USC

The University of Southern California is one of the world’s leading private research universities. An anchor institution in Los Angeles and a global center for arts, technology and international business, USC’s diverse curricular offerings provide extensive opportunities for interdisciplinary study and collaboration with leading researchers in highly advanced learning environments. Visit the USC Center for Systems and Software Engineering website at http://csse.usc.edu/new/.

About CISQ

The Consortium for Information & Software Quality™ (CISQ™) is an IT leadership group that develops international standards for automating the measurement of software size and structural quality from the source code. The standards written by CISQ enable IT and business leaders to measure the risk IT applications pose to the business, as well as estimate the cost of ownership. CISQ was co-founded by the Object Management Group® (OMG®) and Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University. For more information, visit https://www.it-cisq.org/