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As a software professional of 17 years' standing, 12 of them devoted to software quality, it nonetheless came as something of a surprise to the Cofounder and CEO of Parasoft Corporation, Dr Adam Kolawa, that the new drivers of software quality recently have become above all compliance and security.

Speaking to Web Services Journal editor-in-chief Sean Rhody and JDJ Enterprise Editor Yakov Fain live on SYS-CON.TV (http://sys-con.tv), Dr Kolawa - winner of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2001 in the software category - said:

"It used to be that software quality was important in the industry because people wanted to have better software but now software quality is starting to be a part of compliance - which is related to Sarbanes-Oxley and to security."

"I believe that software quality is finally going mainstream and is becoming something that everyone has to start doing," he added.

Testing and Quality Assurance (QA) has been affected by the move the SOA and Web services, Kolawa said. "In the industry we see a lot of people beginning to use Web services, but Web services are opening a lot of security holes."

In his interview he discusses what the role of an Enterprise Architect needs to be, in these new times. "The focus of the industry is on the IDE," he explains, "but that is really the least important part of the infrastructure."

Dr Kolawa also talks about unit testing at the sub-module level and about the importance of regression testing.

"The moment anything works, you need to put a huge emphasis on building the regression test suite and maintaining the regression test suite."

Privately funded, Parasoft is a software development company that provides uniquely innovative products and services that help companies increase efficiency and reduce development related costs. Parasoft customers span across industries, and include Fortune 500 companies such as Lockheed Martin, Hewlett-Packard, Goldman Sachs, Motorola and Intel. The company offers technically sophisticated tools to automate several programming practices that are often considered to be time-consuming, expensive and monotonous.