Cal Poly information systems professor Patricia McQuaid was a keynote speaker at the Southeast European Testing Conference 2016 (SEETEST), held in Bucharest, Romania, in September. The talk was entitled, “Best Practices for Independent Quality Assurance of Major IT Projects.” She also gave a four-hour tutorial, entitled “Test Design Techniques.”
In October, she presented a talk similar to her keynote talk, at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference in Portland, Oregon. She presented this talk with Dr. Ying Kwong, the Statewide Quality Assurance Program Manager for the Office of the Oregon State CIO. She, Dr. Kwong, and Dr. Pettit, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the State of Oregon, published a paper on the topic in the December issue of the American Society for Quality’s (ASQ) software division journal, the Software Quality Professional.
McQuaid was also invited by the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the State of Oregon to speak at the State capital in Salem, Oregon. She discussed software quality, software testing, software process improvement, and project management issues, tailored to their methodologies of developing software projects. There were nearly 60 people from 23 agencies in attendance. Representatives of these agencies attended the talk: Commission for the Blind, Administrative Services, Consumer and Business Services, Corrections, Environmental Quality, Fish and Wildlife, Human Services – Shared Services, Public Safety Standards and Training, State Lands, Legislative Fiscal Office, Office of the State CIO, Board of Pharmacy, Construction Contractors Board, Agriculture, Justice and Health Authority – Shared Services, Housing and Community Services, Judicial Department, Legislature, Parks and Recreation, Public Employees Retirement System, Secretary of State.
Since Cal Poly formed a CyberSecurity Center in 2013, McQuaid has been involved in a variety of way.
She is a faculty liaison to the Orfalea College of Business for the Cybersecurity Case Study Library (CSCL), a collaborative project in conjunction with Cal Poly’s Cybersecurity Center which allows students and staff from all disciplines to engage with cybersecurity research and data. Students across all majors have the opportunity to create case studies on cybersecurity events, exploring how cybersecurity affects their area of study and encouraging them to apply their critical thinking skills in order to find innovative solutions. The case studies created by students as part of CSCL are then used by professors as curricula to teach their classes how to analyze, interpret, and solve potential cybersecurity threats. Each case study explores a topic traditionally associated with cybersecurity and connects it with a discipline such as political science, philosophy, and agribusiness. By exploring cybersecurity issues across multiple disciplines, classrooms are exposed to valuable security content they might not otherwise study. Pat and a professor from the college of agriculture are supervising a team of two students writing a case study, one person from Information Systems and one from agri-business.
McQuaid has been appointed as a California Cyber Training Complex (CCTC) Research and Education Coordinator, representing the Orfalea College of Business. This initiative is a collaborative partnership between Cal Poly and the California Military Department, located at Camp San Luis Obispo, and relates to cybersecurity youth education and skills development programs. The CCTC will host and support the CyberCalifornia Cyber Innovation Challenge (CCIC) for 2017 and 2018 for the State of California. The CCIC is an annual cybersecurity competition for high school students that will leverage existing cybersecurity competition network and outreach programs, including the Air Force Association’s CyberPatriot Program and the San Diego Mayor’s Cyber Cup. By coordinating these existing high school cybersecurity competitions and increasing access to cyber innovation challenges, the CIC will help California’s defense community proactively address the global cybersecurity skills gap. McQuaid will be working on these initiatives.
McQuaid is also is the Program Chair of the seventh World Congress for Software Quality (WCSQ) to be held in March 2017 in Lima, Peru. The international conference, held every 3 years, and is sponsored by the American Society for Quality (ASQ) software division, the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE), and European quality interests. McQuaid will give a presentation entitled “A Plan for Providing Cyber Education for Critical Infrastructure Protection to Law Enforcement Personnel,” related to the Cal Poly cybersecurity initiatives.