CHICAGO, IL (OCTOBER 2009) - Chicago Quality Assurance Association, a Chapter Member of QAI's Global Community, welcomed Keynote Speaker Dr. Bill Curtis.

     Speaking to an audience of Chicago-land IT Quality Assurance Leaders, Dr. Bill Curtis, Chief Scientist, CAST and the co-author of the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model (CMM), addressed the urgency for quality assurance (QA) directors and managers to be proactive in defending IT interruptions. "Because business executives now consider IT applications to be among the greatest risks to the business, quality professionals need to focus increasingly on how well critical applications are engineered to avoid damaging events such as -- outages, performance degradations, data corruption, and security breaches," remarked Dr. Curtis.  "Detecting problems in the non-functional, engineered quality of applications opens up new opportunities for quality professionals to ensure dependability and provide critical data for assessing and controlling business risk. Additionally, this expanded role places them closer to the business where jobs are stable," added Curtis.

     "Expanding the role of QA professionals within an organization beyond functionality testing to a more holistic view of software and its deployment into the core business will take our profession to a new level of business value," commented Nancy Kastl President of CQAA. "QA will provide leadership in maximizing business agility as well as optimizing software quality and time to market delivery - a need that must be filled."

About the Chicago Quality Assurance Association

     Chicago Quality Assurance Association (CQAA), a Chapter Member of the QAI Global Community, is a nonprofit professional organization, established in 1984 to promote quality principles and practices within Chicago-area companies. CQAA provides a forum for information professionals to present and discuss quality and process management within information systems, technology, and services. Currently CQAA serves 1400 members. For more information on CQAA please visit www.cqaa.org.

About Dr. Bill Curtis

     Dr. Bill Curtis is Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist with CAST, a leader in providing technology for measuring application software quality (www.castsoftware.com). He is co-author of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), the People CMM, and the Business Process MM. He has published four books, over 150 articles, and recently elected a Fellow of the IEEE for his contributions to software process improvement and measurement. He was also recently named Director of CISQ, the Consortium for IT Software Quality. (http://www.it-cisq.org)