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Quality assurance

The Meltdown/Spectre CPU bugs: a dramatic global case of the “Unintended Consequences” pattern [UPDATED 4/4/18]

January 31, 2018
The Meltdown/Spectre CPU bugs: a dramatic global case of the “Unintended Consequences” pattern [UPDATED 4/4/18]

Back in 2000, PricewaterhouseCooper published my research white paper, “Patterns in IT Litigation: Systems Failure (1976-2000)” (PDF). This paper reflected research I and my staff had done over several months on roughly 120 two- or three-party lawsuits involving information technology. I found that almost all of these lawsuits fell into one or two of six […]

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An approach to software release

October 10, 2013 3 Comments
An approach to software release

The following excerpt is taken — with a few minor edits — from a white paper I wrote on quality assurance back in the late 1990s for a large corporate client. Given the rather intense coverage of the failings of the Healthcare.gov website — which clearly was not ready for prime time — I thought […]

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Weighing in on Project Orca

November 10, 2012 0 Comments
Weighing in on Project Orca

Cross posted from And Still I Persist] [Note: I am currently in transit from Colorado to Florida and am composing this post as I have time and ‘net access.] “All the most important mistakes are made on the first day.” – The Art of Systems Architecting (Maier & Rechtin) Project Orca was the Romney campaign’s […]

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Two new Baseline columns up

September 24, 2008 0 Comments
Two new Baseline columns up

The first column, “Second Class Software Quality for Major IT Projects”, talks about the curious fact that organizations are willing to spend millions, tens of millions, even hundred of millions of dollars on major IT project and yet still nickle-and-dime their software quality assurance (SQA) effort. It doesn’t help that SQA personnel are pretty much […]

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Slides from IEEE Reliability Society presentation

September 11, 2008 0 Comments
Slides from IEEE Reliability Society presentation

As mentioned previously, I spoke last week at the Denver IEEE Reliabilty Society chapter meeting on an SQA-centric view of software development. I plan to develop this into a full-blown articles (or posting), but in the meantime, here is the slide presentation (PPT, 340KB) I used. Feel free to ask questions. ..bruce..

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