EuroSPI 2014 discussed about measurement and innovation

EuroSPI 2014 conference was held in Luxembourg during the last week of June. Conference included five workshops and two conference days. EuroSPI conference is a good mix of academic and industrial papers, all together appr 50 presentations. Conference keynotes were about software testing, enterprise architecture and SPICE experiences.

FiSMA contributed in two topics: functional safety and measurement. Our presentations were based on our new ideas in Nuclear SPICE and NorthernSCOPE. Wide range of other topics was discussed in other conference papers, including change management, assurance thinking, improvement strategy and SPI in very small entities.

EuroSPI conference is changing itself, extending partnerships mainly in Asia. The Euro(Asia)SPI 2015 Conference will take place from 30. September - 2. October 2015 in Ankara, Turkey and will be hosted by the Turkish Standards Institution. Call for papers is currently open.

More information: Risto Nevalainen, FiSMA Senior Advisor, risto.nevalainen (at) fisma.fi

ISO/IEC 29110 for Games

Lappeenranta University of Technology has been researching games from the viewpoint of software engineering in a multi-year spanning project which has had 11 company partners from the industry. As a part of the project, work has began on adapting the software process model principles of the ISO/IEC 29110 Very Small Enterprise Life Cycle model to the game companies.

The resulting deployment package ”High Iteration Software Process Model” aims to combine the late change requests, challenges of the creative aspects and other peculiarities of the game development world with the process thinking of software engineering. The work is currently in draft, and will be publicly available later this year.

During the development, most up-to-date information can be asked via email from Jussi Kasurinen (D.Sc.) at address jussi.kasurinen@lut.fi. Dr. Kasurinen is the manager of the research projects involved, and the main author of the deployment pack itself.

Nuclear SPICE

FiSMA has been an active partner in Finnish national nuclear safety research program SAFIR 2014 for several years. Main responsibility has been to develop process assessment approaches for safety-critical systems and software in nuclear power domain. Now this work is nearly finished and the result is Nuclear SPICE model. It is an integrated set of SPICE (ISO/IEC 15504 and 330xx standard), selected nuclear domain safety standards and selected nuclear regulatory guides. Nuclear SPICE model has been validated in several pilot assessments with system suppliers for Finnish nuclear industry. Nuclear SPICE assessments can be applied to supplier qualification, project qualification, and product development qualification with strict safety-criticality.

FiSMA Association, Spinet Oy and Teollisuuden Voima Oy (a Finnish nuclear power company) will organize a 4-day Nuclear SPICE training during week 38 in Helsinki, Finland. Training days are 16-19.9.2014. Training will lead to Provisional Nuclear SPICE Assessor certificate, to act as a team member in internal or independent assessments.

For more information, please contact Risto Nevalainen, Senior Advisor in FiSMA, risto.nevalainen@fisma.fi.

Greetings from the XP-conference in Rome

The fifteenth international conference on agile software development (XP 2014) was arranged between 26th and 30th of May in the sunny city of Rome, Italy. The local venue was more than excellent for the purposes for the conference, and overall the general mood during the week was relaxed yet functional. The approach to the discussions over the new trends of agile development was fit for the subject; flash speeches intersecting the open space sessions and presentations. In addition to this, conference also had managed to squeeze several workshops and tutorials into the program, so that the visitors got more than just a theoretical sampling of the new ideas.

The agile development methods are refined and matured, this cannot be disputed. In fact, looking into the conference in retrospective says much about the content, we are beyond the basic things and going into the advanced and specialized domains. Several presentations discussed and focused on different techniques, models and games which are meant to ease the application of agile principles, and in general, the focus seem to have shifted towards managing agile processes and scaling agility towards larger projects, away from the traditional software development. This was also mentioned in the most poignant keynote of the conference, given by Robert C. Martin, who saw that the ’agile world is falling into the pit of certification’. According to him, the best hope to avoid this unwanted development is to go back to the basic values and principles of Extreme Programming, and start again from there.

As per usual, there was a strong Finnish presence in the conference, and this may not be complete coincidence, since the new venue for XP conference will be at Aalto University in Helsinki. Aalto will be hosting the conference on 25th to 29th of May in 2015; more information, call for papers and other interesting facts are available at http://www.xp2015.org/.

Person reporting from the conference was Tuomas Mäkilä, who is currently working on the AgiES research project, focusing on the application of agile methods in the development of embedded systems.

ISO/IEC 29119 Courses

During this Spring, the members of FiSMA have been returning back to school, since FiSMA has arranged a series of their well-received training courses on the international standards and their application. This time the selected standard was ISO/IEC 29119 Software Testing standard, which was dissected and disseminated during the two day courses, first held in February and due to large demand, repeated during the first week of June.

Overall, the course discussed the first four parts of the standards in detail, and additionally discussed the overall state of Finnish software testing and quality assurance in the industry, while also introducing the relevant related standards and assessment models. As usual, feedback on the course was that both implementations were liked and well-received.

For more information, and access to the course material can be requested from the FiSMA offices, see front page for details.