Disbanding the "Process Police": New Visions for Assuring Compliance

This article presents a vision of future techniques and approaches for software assurance, based on interviews with researchers for NASA´s Office of Safety and Mission Assurance, and their sense of research trends and future directions. Key components of this vision include a more constructive role for software assurance, based upon early and effective collaboration with software developers, techniques that aim to ensure the quality of software as it is being built rather than after the fact, and earlier feedback loops of the assessments of software quality.