Data Level Assurance and Software Quality

• In Event: Enterprise Systems, IT Reputation and Software Quality

Abstract

Providing information to stakeholders to assist them in making their evaluations of a firm’s performance is a topic that is generating renewed interest. Financial crises serve as major reasons for discussion of information availability and quality issues; additionally technological developments have also started to drive this discussion. Continuous reporting systems have received attention as an approach to providing stakeholders with information on a more current basis, and the technology makes these systems feasible. A major question that must be resolved is how to ensure that these systems will continue to provide data that is of sufficient quality for stakeholders to make value relevant decisions. Clearly the traditional model used to review data disclosed by the firm will not work when the lag between an event and data about the event is reduced and becomes continuously available. This paper looks at the concept of data level assurance; providing a continually updated quality measure which communicates the accuracy level for data made available with zero lag. Four factors which influence the ability of a continuous reporting system to provide quality data are presented and related to software product quality metrics.

Author

• Graham Gal, University of Massachusetts