Holistic software assessment: a research vision

About a year ago, I gave a presentation at the University of Zurich about "Holistic software assessment". The talk outlines the idea of assessment as a new research domain focused on software engineering decision making. Essentially, I argue that:

• Assessment must be approached as an explicit discipline that is more than software analysis.
• This discipline must integrate existing approaches to accommodate the multidimensionality of software evolution, and it must make these tailorable to match the contexts in which decisions are being made.
• The research method must integrate the engineering effort explicitly in order to produce reliable platforms that enable scalable and practical research.

You might say this is too ambitious, but I think that doing it otherwise is simple not effective.