Theme: Quality and Intelligent Systems: Where the Human is the Most Important Asset.
Watch the playlist
Programme
- Opening Address - Raid AlQaisi, Quality SG Chair and Margaret Ross, Quality SG Vice-Chair and Treasurer
- Opening Keynote: "Using AI for Better Requirements" - Tom Gilb HonFBCS
Watch the video | Download slides - "Human Behaviour Effect on Projects" - Niels Malotaux
Watch the video | Download slides - "Human Context in Requirements Elicitation" - Emeritus Professor Kerstin Siak
Watch the video | Download slides - "SolarWinds Orion and CrowdStrike's Flacon Updates: A Cyber Security View" - Andrew Jenkinson
Watch the video - "People, Processes, and Tools: Leveraging the Return on Investment" - Dr Larry Kennedy
Watch the video | Download slides - Closing Keynote: "Personable AI for Hire: Human-AI Teaming in the Workplace" - Dr Barclay Brown
Watch the video - Closing Remarks - Raid AlQaisi, Quality SG Chair and Margaret Ross, Quality SG Vice-Chair and Treasurer
Synopsis
Welcome to SQM XXXI - the 31st Software Quality Conference (SQM) 2024 online.
This year's conference's general theme is "Quality and Intelligent Systems: Where the Human is the Most Important Asset".
With the advancement of various fields, especially AI, it is important to keep the human asset importance in mind particularly when it comes to quality.
We are delighted to announce the speakers:
- Tom Gilb - Opening Keynote: Using AI for Better Requirements
- Niels Malotaux: Human Behaviour Effect on Projects
- Kerstin Siakas: Human Context in Requirements Elicitation
- Andrew Jenkinson: SolarWinds Orion and CrowdStrike's Flacon Updates: A Cyber Security View
- Larry Kennedy: People, Processes, and Tools: Leveraging the Return on Investment
- Barclay Brown - Closing Keynote: Personable AI for Hire: Human-AI Teaming in the Workplace
Using AI for better quality and value requirements - Tom Gilb - Opening Keynote
Planguage (Competitive Engineering, 2005) gives a way to express all value and quality requirements quantitatively. But people have too little culture and education in doing this. AI has no such hesitation, and will give good quality requirement suggestions with good scales of measure and good Meters, etc. Just ask!
Human Behaviour Effect on Projects - Niels Malotaux
Recognizing and accepting Human Behaviour can help us to do a better job - Systems are conceived, designed, implemented, maintained, used, and tolerated (or not) by people. People react, often sub-consciously, in a certain way. Going against that is almost impossible (we can't compete with our genes).
Most system development methods ignore human behaviour, or assume a certain behaviour that differs from how people actually behave. Wouldn’t recognizing it, accepting it, and then looking how we can use that for better results, be useful to do a better job?
We will discuss several human behavioural traits, which we perhaps cannot do something about, but can learn to do something with, nonetheless.
About the speakers
Tom Gilb HonFBCS
Tom Gilb is an American systems engineer, consultant, and author, known for the development of software metrics, software inspection, and evolutionary processes. He emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1956 and to Norway in 1958.
He took his first job with International Business Machines Corporation in 1958 and became a freelance consultant in 1960. He mainly helps multinational clients improve their organizations and methods by using "evolutionary systems delivery" (Evo). He has guest lectured at universities all over the United Kingdom, Europe, China, India, the United States of America and Korea, and has been a keynote speaker at dozens of technical conferences internationally. He is a member of INCOSE and is active in the Norwegian chapter, NORSEC, which presented him with an award in 2003. He lectures at INCOSE local chapters on his worldwide travels and at INCOSE conferences. In 2012 he was made an Honorary Fellow of the British Computer Society.
Niels Malotaux
An independent international development team coach, and expert in optimizing organisational, management, project, and team performance. He has some 45-year experience in designing electronic and software systems, at Philips Electronics, 20 years leading an electronic systems design company, and since 1998 helping projects to deliver Quality on Time: delivering the Right Results at the Right Time, enabling customer success.
From time to time he still develops electronic products for clients, which allows him to understand the pitfalls of developers first hand. Since 2001 he taught and coached well over 400 projects and teams in 40+ organisations in the Netherlands, Belgium, China, Germany, Ireland, India, Israel, Japan, Poland, Romania, Serbia, South Africa, the UK and the US, which led to a wealth of experience in which approaches work better, and which work less well in practice.
Dr. Kerstin Siakas
An Emerita Professor at the Department of Information and Electronic Engineering at International Hellenic University, Thessaloniki, Greece and a Visiting Professor at the School of Technology and Innovations, Industrial Management Programme at University of Vaasa, Finland. Her specialty as a professor includes Information Systems Quality, Innovation and Social Networks. She received her BSc and MSc degrees in economics in 1975 and 1977 respectively from Swedish Handelshögskolan at Åbo Academy, Finland and her PhD in 2002 in Software Quality Management from the Department of Computing, Communication Technology & Mathematics, London Metropolitan University, UK.
Kerstin also has an extensive industrial experience in developing Information Systems on different levels (programmer, analyst, IT manager) from mainly global organizations in different countries, such as Kommundata AB in Stockholm Sweden (5 years) and Siemens Tele Industry AG in Thessaloniki, Greece (8 years).
She is engaged in research in Multidisciplinary Approaches of Software Engineering. She is interested in the impact and effect of technology on society, in particularly from a social, cultural and political viewpoint, and how society impacts on technology innovations. She has a particular interest in the emerging subsequent challenges for managers, educators and governments.
Larry Kennedy
Dr. Kennedy has provided consulting services to businesses and nonprofit organizations since 1985. His clients have included criminal justice, educational, health care, and government leaders. His inter-disciplinary background in engineering and business, together with his practical experiences as a nonprofit trustee and foundation executive have uniquely prepared him to evaluate and train managers.
With over thirty years of Quality Management experience in aerospace, business, and as a management consultant and trainer, he has a broad perspective on management reform processes and the development of public and private collaborations. He was also mentored by Phillip Crosby, the world-renowned Quality Management executive, who partnered with him in reaching out to the nonprofit world.
As Founder and CEO of the Quality Management Institute (QMI) he has created online individual and cohort learning with Professional Certifications in Systems Engineering, Clinical Research, and Business and Nonprofit Leadership along with enterprise-level Quality Accelerator Programs. QMI’s “Eight Attributes” have been adopted as “both a standard for performance and a standard for training that creates a positive quality management work culture” by the Site Accreditation and Standards Institute’s global standard for the Accreditation of Clinical Research Sites.
Dr. Kennedy and the Eight Attributes have also been referenced in the International Council of Systems Engineering (INCOSE) Official Handbook sections for Quality Management. Larry held systems engineering positions in Apollo Spacecraft Operations and Flight Crew Training where he first practiced Quality Management disciplines.This scientific background honed his practical expertise in systems analysis. His later experiences as a manager and business owner broadened his understanding of process management principles. He also gained national recognition for his sales and marketing expertise.
As a human services developer, he has organized and directed the certification of residential and outpatient substance abuse services, mental health services, and inmate work release and aftercare programs using J.C.A.H.O. and C.A.R.F. criteria. He has trained nonprofit staff and volunteers for projects with as many as 20,000 participants. He was the lead consultant to the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) to coordinate and write the Management Reform Plan for the Washington, D.C. Department of Corrections, under mandate from the U.S. Congress. He also represented the NIC in the implementation of the reform plan which included extensive leadership training.
He has served as the Chair, Co-Chair, or lead facilitator of numerous national and international colloquiums on management reform, leadership, and philanthropy including the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C.; Council on Foundations, Washington D.C.; National Cathedral, Washington, D.C.; St. Petersburg State University School of Medicine, St. Petersburg, Russia; and the World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland. As a foundation executive and consultant, he has performed numerous on-site program evaluations and has developed innovative approaches to grant making and technical assistance for recipients in a broad range of social issues.
He has also managed and given oversight to humanitarian projects on a local, national, and international scale. Dr. Kennedy has lectured extensively in business, educational, government, and humanitarian venues on the integration of effective management principles into business and human services processes. His books, Keeping the Promise: A Work Ethic for Doing Things Right and Quality Management in the Nonprofit World have been widely referenced by business, nonprofit and academic leaders.
Andrew Jenkinson
A senior and seasoned innovative Executive with over 30 years' experience as a hands-on lateral thinking CEO, coach, and leader.
A 'big deal' business accelerator, and inspirational, lateral thinker, Andy has crafted, created, and been responsible for delivering 100’s £millions of projects within the Cyber, Technical, Risk and Compliance markets for some of the world's largest, leading organisations. Andy has a demonstrable track record of large-scale technical delivery and management within many sectors including the Professional, Managed, and Financial Services.
Andy was one of the first, and very few people to discover the plethora of insecure SolarWinds domains post their massive cyberattack in 2020. It has since been proven that Andy’s version of the attack (and hundreds of others) that an insecure subdomain being hijacked and replaced by a nefarious website being stood up, has now become common knowledge. It has subsequently been accepted as being the initial access and root cause of the initial infiltration (Sunburst).
Andy’s research and paper was presented to the United States Senate Intelligence Committee overseeing the SolarWinds breach in January 2021. Following on from the success of Andy’s first book, Stuxnet to Sunburst, 20 years of digital exploitation and cyber warfare, Andy’s second book which collated his experience and in-depth research of over 1000 companies, all of whom have been victims of cyber and ransomware attacks is titled Ransomware and Cybercrime. This book was published in June 2022. In 2022 Andy was commissioned to author his third book on the Ukraine and Russian cyberwars that acted as a precursor to the all-out offensive that commenced on the 24 February 2022. This book is titled Digital Blood on Their Hands.
Andy has just finished authoring a fourth book that will be published in 2024 and uncovers the interconnectedness of cyber crime and surveillance. The book is titled Surveillance, the Blueprint for Cyber Crime. In 2021 Andy was invited to sit on the Council of The International Advisory for Human Health, Education and Research Foundation as a Global Security Advisor. In January 2022 Andy was named a Top 30 Cyber Security expert by The European Institute of Risk.
In 2022, Andy was made a Fellow of The Cyber Theory Institute and cited as The Global expert in Domain Name System (DNS) vulnerabilities. In July 2023 Andy was invited by the office of The Rt. Hon Julian Lewis MP to author a Paper for the Joint Cyber National Security Strategy (JCNSS) Parliamentary Committee Inquiry. In June 2023 Andy was invited by The Rt. Hon. Stephen McPartland to become a director to the newly formed Fintech & Cybersecurity Alliance (FITCA) as an advisor to governments in his field of expertise.
Dr Barclay Brown
Is Senior Fellow for AI Research at Collins Aerospace, a division of RTX.
The latest generative AI systems using large language models can write, speak, and draw as well as most humans. Though they are not human in some important ways, they can be thought of as a persons for the purpose of understanding how to work and collaborate with them. This talk explores a variety of ways to view the AI-human relationship and explains ways to incorporate AI capabilities into a quality culture workplace. We compare AI-human relationships to other familiar relationships including human-human, human-animal, human-machine and human-imaginary relationships to gain insight into how considering AIs as a new kind of being, though not human, can improve workplace productivity and enjoyment.
Before joining Collins,as Senior Fellow for AI Research at Collins Aerospace, a division of RTX , Barclay Brown was an engineering fellow in Raytheon Missiles and Defense, focusing on MBSE, and prior to that he was the Global Solution Executive for the Aerospace and Defense Industry at IBM.
Dr. Brown holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, two master’s degrees in psychology and business and a PhD in industrial and systems engineering. He is author of Engineering Intelligent Systems, published by Wiley, and is a certified Expert Systems Engineering Professional (ESEP), certified Systems Engineering Quality Manager, and former CIO of INCOSE and adjunct faculty at the Quality Management Institute.
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This event is brought to you by: Quality specialist group, Hampshire branch and Dorset branch
