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SQA is by definition responsible for product conformance to REQUIREMENTS. SQA cannot undertake such a responsibility unless it participates in the contractual phase. SQA has to approve both cost and technical proposals in the request for proposal phase. SQA approval of the cost proposal is important to ensure that SQA is properly budgeted to uphold its responsibility. Efforts in the contractual phase should not be saved. It is better to invest three more months in the contractual phase than scrap a project after five years and to continue court battles for the next decade. Software engineering will approach systems engineering. The process of implementation will be more and more automated. Future software engineering will be a massive dialogue between customer and supplier to reach a joint product specification. Major advances are being made in rapid prototyping and application generators to support the joint customer and supplier product specification phase. Software engineering is slowly approaching the stage of automatic code generation from specification also in the area of embedded computer systems, although this was considered a virtual impossibility only a few years ago. The number one problem will be how the supplier would be able to understand what the customer wants and how the customer would be able to ascertain that the supplier has understood what he wants. The future thrust of both in-house SQA and customer IVV&T shall be in the contractual specification phase.

The issue of liability shall be addressed much more strictly. Liability shall not be only on a corporate basis, but in the author’s opinion there shall be personal liability for corporate management, project office management, software development management and SQA management. The issue is not about this or that software engineering method or tool being adequate but about personal responsibility. There shall be appropriate legislation in the criminal code to enforce the personal responsibility for safety critical projects. The gap between legislation and the computer era has to be closed.