Agena

Agena Ltd. is a consultancy company (based in Cambridge, UK) that specialises in risk management and decision support for business-critical and safety-critical computer-based systems. Agena was established in 1997 as a private company that emerged from City University's Centre for Software Reliability to exploit the extensive research that had been undertaken in Bayesian Belief Nets and software metrics.

Agena has rapidly become the leading provider of BBN application solutions. Examples of recent commercial projects include a BBN-based decision-support tool for predicting vehicle reliability (for a major defence agency), a BBN-based tool for evaluating Programmable Electronic Systems (PES) reliability (for a major transport company) and a BBN-based tool for predicting software defect rates for a major consumer electronics company.

Additionally, Agena has provided consultancy on formal methods and software metrics. In the last 12 months, Agena's clients have included AON, DERA, now QinetiQ, National Air Traffic Services, Motorola, Philips, and Railtrack

Agena Core Business

Core Business: Agena is delivering solutions to risk assessment problems for critical software systems. Increasingly Agena's clients are interested in tool support for software quality assessment with special emphasis on defect prediction at different phases in the life-cycle. While Agena has developed some partial solutions in this respect (including one in collaboration with Philips) it has not addressed the crucial issue of distributed development environments into its models. It is therefore clear that the MODIST method and tool will provide significant added value to Agena's consultancy services.

Exploitation plan: In the short-term (0-24 months after project completion) Agena will market the method to organisations either building distributed systems or wishing to evaluate the quality of their distributed work processes. The important point to note here is that Agena already has a client list interested in exactly these kinds of solutions. Since these organisations are market leaders and standards setters within their own fields, it is expected that there would be a filter-through effect on these companies' clients. For example, Agena has done extensive work on software risk prediction for National Air Traffic Services (NATS) and it is likely that NATS would be a User Group member for MODIST. Since NATS would be one of Agena's clients for MODIST, their own adoption of the method would lead to their own contractors' wishing or needing to use it. In the medium term (12-36 months) Agena will also integrate the demonstrator tool into a dedicated decision support tool to be marketed in support of the MODIST method. It is anticipated that there will be two versions of such a tool. One would be a fully tailorable version targeted at major organisations that have diverse software processes and distributed development. The other would be an 'off-the-shelf' package for smaller organisations; this version would be based on a single process model that is as generic as the MODIST method allows.

Anticipated impact on core business: As part of its core business Agena uses BBNs to provide assessments of critical systems. The MODIST method and tool will significantly improve the quality of these services and will also open up new areas of business and applications, especially in the Internet and distributed systems arena.

www.agena.co.uk