[trustable-software] The Elephant In the Elevator Pitch

[Paul Sherwood]

Hi all
I'm replying to Edmund's "What is Trustable About" email, but I hope you 
may agree that my subject line is more interesting :-)

I've been attempting to come up with an "Elevator Pitch" for Trustable 
for ages. My understanding is that the term is shorthand for "you're in 
an elevator with a potential investor/customer - you have until the 
elevator doors open to get them interested in your product/service".

 From this I take it that we have 30-60 seconds to get our point across. 
That's 75-150 words. Here goes:

"If the elevator that we are in were to fall and crash into the floor 
due to mechanical or civil engineering failure, our families and friends 
would expect that subsequently it would be possible to establish what 
had gone wrong, which standards and laws were broken, and who was 
accountable.

If the same accident were to happen as a result of a problem in the 
software that controls a fleet of elevators in a building, it is  
extremely unlikely that we could establish what standards applied, let 
alone who was accountable.

Almost all high-tech elevator pitches over the last few decades have 
been built on immature software industry practices which are unregulated 
and provide no evidence to justify our trust. The Trustable Software 
project is working with engineers, regulators, sponsors to establish a 
broadly useful framework for evidence-based asssessment of whether 
software is trustable or not."

148 words. Any feedback or suggestions to improve this would be 
gratefully received.

br
Paul