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Dr. Bill Curtis

Dr. Bill Curtis is Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist with Cast Software, a leader in providing technology for measuring and evaluating the structural quality of application software. He Is also the Director of the Consortium for IT Software Quality. He co-authored the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), the People CMM, and the Business Process MM.

Until its acquisition by Borland he was Co-founder and Chief Scientist of TeraQuest, the global leader in providing CMM-based services which was acquired by Borland. He is a former Director of the Software Process Program in the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to joining the SEI, Dr. Curtis worked for MCC, ITT’s Programming Technology Center, GE Space Division, and taught statistics at the University of Washington.

He has published four books, over 150 articles, and was recently elected a Fellow of the IEEE for his contributions to software process improvement and measurement.

The Global State of Structural Quality in Business Applications

Through improved testing we have gotten much better at ensuring the functional quality of software. However, since testing is driven by requirements which rarely enumerate the non-functional requirements, we are still struggling to ensure the structural quality of software. Unfortunately structural flaws are the most frequent source of serious problems such as outages, security breaches, degraded performance, and data corruption.

The critical role of structural quality in software engineering’s fourth wave will be discussed along with recent developments and results involving the structural analysis of application software. Results from a global study of the structural quality of 745 large commercial applications will be presented. The incorporation of structural quality methods in lean and agile methods will be discussed.