ASQ 509 General Membership Meeting  

Speaker Biography: Jonathan D. Addelston

Jonathan D. Addelston owns and operates UpStart Systems, LLC which provides systems and software engineering consulting services, primarily to Federal Government clients.  The focus is on Enterprise Architecture and Federal information sharing and safeguarding, and trusted advisory services, including process improvement and Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V).

He was the lead architect for the National Maritime Domain Awareness Enterprise Architecture of the Architecture Management Hub led by the U.S. Department of Navy Chief Information Officer (DON CIO). He was the IV&V Team Lead at the DoD Defense Business Transformation that is developing an extensive Business Enterprise Architecture (BEA) from June 2004 to April 2009 in the new DoD Business Transformation Agency and Program Manager for the BEA IV&V for the current DoD Office of the Deputy Chief Management Officer (ODCMO) from October 2012 through September 2013.

He started UpStart Systems as a systems and software engineering consulting practice in 1996, focusing on enterprise architecture, process improvement, business process re-engineering, process management, and independent verification and validation.

He was the CTO at BDM International (1995-96), the Vice President for Software Engineering at PRC, Inc. (1989-95), and a founding Vice President at the Software Productivity Consortium (1986-89).

Mr. Addelston is an active leader in the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) a non-profit, public-private partnership dedicated to improving government through information technology application.  He is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the Collaboration and Transformation (C&T) Shared Interest Group (SIG), the Industry Co-Chair for the Information Sharing Committee, and the ACT-IAC representative to the Standards Coordinating Council co-chaired by the Program Manager for the Information Sharing Environment, under the Director, National Intelligence.  He is also a key advisor to the ACT-IAC IV&V Committee. See http://www.actiac.org 

He is also the co-founder, Program Chair, and key sponsor for the DC Software Process Improvement Network (DC SPIN) which was started in 1992.  This SPIN is co-sponsoring the Software Engineering Working Group (SEPG) North America Workshop with the CMMI Institute in 2014.

Presentation Overview: �IV&V at a Tipping Point"

The speaker will provide a personal, professional tour through the rough terrain of Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V), dramatically demonstrating some of its key strengths and weaknesses for Government software projects, using key maps provided by industry standards,  Guided by Watts Humphrey�s advice about goals, maps, and ground truth, selected project examples will demonstrate the value of a disciplined analysis of the challenges and choices program managers and software development managers face when they consider how to improve software quality and provide trusted, fact-based findings and recommendations to government leads.

Recent front-page catastrophes are influencing key Federal Government managers and acquisition specialists to rethink the best ways they can achieve software quality, even in the face of rapidly declining budgets, the attempts to use Commercial-Off-the-Shelf software and agile software development methods, and deficiencies in many Government Human Capital Plans.  Some parts of the Federal Government are seeking greater control over system integration and acquisitions, while others are shifting from special purpose acquisitions to software purchasing, as it were a commodity.

Based on a current project of the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC), this presentation will survey the current standard approaches for systems and software Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V).  It will summarize the key evolution of the IEEE Standard for System and Software Verification and Validation (IEEE Std 1012-2012 and little-known, but fundamental, original work by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (SEI/CMU).

The presentation will show a novel model for DoD Embedded IV&V which he jointly developed with the DoD Business Mission Area Chief Technology Officer and applied to the DoD Business Enterprise Architecture.

While IV&V can be a very useful project asset, it should not be considered to be a �quick win� or �silver bullet� for system or software quality.  The IV&V alternatives will be compared and traced to the key requirements for IV&V, showing which project categories, life cycles, and software development approaches should adopt which IV&V models, for efficiency and effectiveness.

Plenty of time will be allocated for interactive discussions during the presentation and the speaker promises to follow up with answers to challenges which cannot be met during the ASQ 509 meeting.