Indicateurs et Tableaux de bord Qualité en IngénierieInformatique Quality
(Performance Indicators in Software Engineering)

DATE: April 18, 2002

PLACE: Rideau Room, Sheraton Hotel, 150 Albert Street

SPEAKER: Jean-Paul Lucas

EVENT ABSTRACT

Testimony on quality performance indicators implementation in a large software house.
Software process improvement requires motivation and a willingness to follow best engineering practices the part of the software development team such as product managers, designers, developers and testers but requires also the involvement of management. In this presentation we will look at how to involve all members of a software engineering company from developers to executive manager, in a global process to define, implement and maintain quality performance Indicators. How from basic metrics picked up on software projects, we can produce executive performance indicators, establishing and consolidating Performance Indicators at each management level to answer to each level's respective concerns. Finally, we present an Executive Management tool used to measure how the general company objectives and quality objectives are reached, allowing to define improvements at the top level, and by the way declinable to lower levels down to software engineering processes (top-down improvements implementation resulting from bottom up information gathering).

WHO SHOULD ATTEND THIS EVENT:

• decision-makers at all levels of software engineering organisation willing to set-up performance indicators to guide their organisation; and
• software practitioners looking to improve their use of engineering best practices.

BY ATTENDING THIS EVENT YOU WILL LEARN:

• how to start a process of software measurements gathering, possibly using existing metrics in your company; and
• how to pilot your organisation by improvement process implemented at each level.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Graduated in Computer Sciences at Doctorate level from the first ranked French university (Université Paris Dauphine), Jean-Paul Lucas has dedicated over 15 years of his experience the quality assurance applied to critical software-base systems, such as: telesupervision of the world largest petroleum complex (Upper Zakum, Abu Dhabi); data processing of international nuclear reprocessing plant (La Hague, France); attitude and orbit control systems of european telecommunications satellites (Italsat, Inmarsat 2, Télécom 2, Hispasat) and earth observation satellites (Spot4 and Hélios); survival control systems of satellites Spot4 and Hélios, ground data processing of satellite Hélios and instrument management system of Dash8-S400 regional aircraft (Toronto).

Quality Director of MARBEN Group (Software House specialised in telecommunication and network integration systems - staff of 1,100 in Europe) for six years, he successfully steered the implementation of the quality system in order to obtain the ISO 9001 registration in 1994 being one of the first twenty French software houses to achieve this qualification. In this position he was also in charge of the annual Quality System Improvement Plan. In early 1996, he promoted an oriented-process approach, using international assessment and improvement models such as SPICE, Trillium and CMM to determine Quality System improvement within its processes.

Jean-Paul Lucas is a SPICE Assessor (designation awarded by the European Software Institute in 1996) and ISO 9001 Auditor Assessor (designation awarded by the "Mouvement Français pour la Qualité) in 1997). He has also been a workgroup member for "Assessment and improvement of the software engineering maturity" (ISO 15504 - SPICE standardisation workgroup within Association Française des Normes - AFNOR) and workgroup member for "Functional Analysis - Value Analysis" (Centre de Maîtrise des Systèmes et du Logiciel, within the "Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers", Paris) from 1997 to 2000.