Quality & Risk Management Challenges When Acquiring Enterprise Systems Revised in the Age of AI

Much has been written about quality and risk management from the perspectives of organizations that design, develop, and implement software systems. However, many enterprises no longer build software systems internally but, instead, acquire them from contractors. For an organization that acquires software systems, project management needs to be done from a different perspective, and quality and risk management needs a different focus and emphasis than the organization responsible for building the systems. This paper marks the fifth anniversary of a PNSQC 2018 paper with the same title. All topics discussed then continue to be relevant today. However, we feel an update is necessary and timely, because of emerging trends in software accessibility, commercial & government cloud, analytics / data science, and artificial intelligence (AI) in most enterprises across all industries. This paper will discuss implications of these trends for software quality and risk management, especially as they relate to requirements in usability, information security (including access control), data quality, software reliability, and high availability.

Paper | Presentation

Jack McDowell

Jack McDowell is the Statewide QA Program Manager with the State of Oregon. The Statewide QA Program provides Quality Assurance services for Oregon’s Major IT Projects, and Quality Assurance consultation to Oregon State Agencies. Before this, he was a web developer and the chief editor of a community newspaper in Arlington, Virginia. Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina where he lived before attending college in the US. He holds a master’s degree in political science from the University of Oregon and a certification in ITIL.