conquest 2009 - iSQI

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Greetings
Ladies and gentlemen,
GREETING
Greeting from Dagmar Wöhrl
Patron of the Conference
I am very pleased to be the patron of the 2009 International
Conference on Quality Engineering in Software Technology
(CONQUEST 2009) in my hometown Nuremberg. After the
Conference had taken place in Berlin and Potsdam in the
last three years, it has now returned to its roots: Twelve
years ago, the Arbeitskreis Software Qualität Franken e.V.
(ASQF e.V.) for the first time invited software developers
from industry and research to an exchange of experiences
on software quality standards to Nuremberg. In the meantime,
CONQUEST has become an internationally acknowledged
information platform for CEOs and experts from
industry and research for quality assurance and further
training of specialised personnel in the field of software.
Modern information and communications technologies
(ICTs) are an essential factor for more economic growth
and employment. ICTs are also growth accelerators and innovation
drivers in many further sectors due to the combination
of ICTs and traditional products. In order to enhance
the international competitiveness of Germany as an ICT
location, the German Federal Chancellor in the year 2006
initiated the IT Summit process, a high-ranking dialogue
with senior representatives from the political, economic
and scientific fields. The preparation of the IT Summits
is coordinated by the Federal Ministry of Economics and
Technology. The Third National IT Summit, which took
place in Darmstadt on 20 November 2008, again highlighted
the great growth opportunities of ICTs for German industry
and in particular underlined the strategic significance of a
software and (IT) services industry that is competitive at
the global level for the overall economy and how important
it is to meet the related need for skilled labour in this area.
I am pleased that the quality assurance of software products
and the qualification of ICT specialists are again issues
at the very top of the agenda of CONQUEST 2009 and
that special attention is paid to the cooperation with this
year’s partner country, India. In view of these topics, the
Conference makes an important contribution to the implementation
of the decisions that were taken on the occasion
of the latest IT Summit and to the further strengthening
of Germany as an ICT location. Against this background, I
wish CONQUEST much success and all participants many
interesting contacts, talks and ideas.
Yours,
Dagmar Wöhrl
Parliamentary State Secretary in the Federal Ministry
of Economics and Technology
Greetings
Greeting from Ina Schieferdecker
Conference Chair
Dear CONQUEST participants, speakers and exhibitors,
I like to welcome you to the 12th International Conference
on Quality Engineering in Software Technology in Nuremberg,
Germany, September 16-18, 2009. We welcome our
companions, newcomers, friends and colleagues from all
over the world. We compiled the conference program out
of over 80 submissions with the intent to offer a high-quality
technical program both for academia and industry. We like
to thank everybody that helped us making CONQUEST 2009
a high-potential event.
Let me share with you some recent thoughts about quality
engineering in software technologies. Since the software
crisis back in the 1960ies, the software industry and research
emphasized the specifics and differences of software as
compared to any form of hardware. I think it was right that
time as the software field had to be established. However, I
question that we are still right these days. Software is basically
a means to make systems more efficient, more handy,
more functional, and alike. Sure, software and all development
artefacts have a standing on their own. We may however
have to reconsider what we can learn from others.
For example, I learnt at university that as software is virtual
it cannot age and cannot have signs of usage, hence does
not need much if at all maintenance. Today, we now know
this to be a bit different: there is software being in use for
30 and more years. The tools with which the software had
been developed years back are not available or in use any
more. The environments in which the software was running
changed as well. Along its usage, the software was
extended, modified and adapted to changes in its environment.
All this makes often a clean architecture corrupted
– the software becomes less elastic for further changes,
which is comparable to ageing materials. Software maintenance
has to gain more attention in our community. Methods
for handling software evolution to ensure that software
continues to meet organisational and business objectives
in a cost effective way are needed. For example, software
renovation is an approach to address issues of ageing software
by refactoring them to current settings. On the other
hand, immateriality of software is responsible for another
phenomenon: software is easily copied. By that, software
duplicates, also called clones, are created right at hand
and give rise for another quality and maintenance problem:
think about a failure being reported, fault being identified
and corrected – however, in one clone only – not in the others.
It would be appreciated to see more contributions in
the direction of software evolution and quality assurance
of evolving software at CONQUEST.
Let me come back to the comparison with other engineering
fields and consider e.g. how other fields address issues
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