TITLE: Quality and the Cost of Ownership for Infrastructure Systems 

SPEAKER: Dr. Khaled El-Emam, University of Ottawa and TrialStat Corporation 

DATE: 25th of May 2006 

ABSTRACT: 

The cost of ownership is affected by the quality of the software (e.g., reliability 
and security). Loss of data, downtime, and patches all add to the cost of ownership. 
When making an acquisition decision, one way to compare competing systems is 
by quantifying the costs of delivered quality. In this presentation we will quantify 
the quality costs of example databases, web servers, and operating systems 
using benchmark data. In addition to learning how to evaluate quality costs, 
attendees will get example comparisons for specific open source and proprietary 
systems. This presentation is based on the recent book "The ROI from Software Quality". 

BIO: 

Dr. El Emam is an Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa, and a Canada 
Research Chair in Electronic Health Information. In addition, Khaled is the Chief 
Scientist at TrialStat Corporation, a company that develops electronic data management 
systems for clinical research. Previously he was a senior research officer at the National 
Research Council of Canada, where he was the technical lead of the Software Quality 
Laboratory, and prior to that he was head of the Quantitative Methods Group at the 
Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering in Kaiserslautern, Germany. 
In 2003 and 2004, Khaled was ranked as the top systems and software engineering 
scholar worldwide by the Journal of Systems and Software based on his research on 
measurement and quality evaluation and improvement, and ranked second in 2002 
and 2005. He holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, 
King's College, at the University of London (UK).