IEEE Computer Society’s Position on Reaffirmation Proposal

1. IEEE Computer Society’s Position on Reaffirmation Proposal Approved by IEEE CS Standards Activities Board February 3, 2011

2. Maintenance of Standards • It is the responsibility of an IEEE standards sponsor to maintain their collection of standards. • Available actions are: • Revise • Withdraw • Reaffirm • Stabilize • In principle, action is required every five years.

3. Reaffirmation Balloting occurs in Two Rounds • Round 1: Balloters read the document, vote whether to reaffirm, and submit any objections stating why the standard is obsolete or erroneous. • The sponsor write a comment disposition rejecting the objections. • Round 2: Sponsor recirculates the objections and balloters reconsider their votes. • Few reaffirmation ballots fail.

4. Perceived Problems in Reaffirmation • The tiny failure rate of reaffirmation raises doubts that balloters are actually reconsidering their votes during recirculation. • Because normative references cannot be changed, standards are reaffirmed with normative references to obsolescent standards. • Sponsors sometimes “agree” with an objection but then state that they are not allowed to change the standard. Then they fail to revise. • Sponsors sometimes “agree” with an objection and ask the balloting group to vote “No”, but they don’t. The last two items raise questions of liability.

5. Proposed Change tabled at IEEE-SA Standards Board • There is a proposal to: • Eliminate reaffirmation and stabilization. • Require that a revision be completed within ten years of publication of a standard. • Standards not revised within ten years will be placed in a category with the working title of “inactive.” • Comment has been requested from sponsors.

6. Advantages of Reaffirmation • Some standards concern engineering principles or slowly changing technologies. • Certainly, software and systems engineering processes • Possibly, power and nuclear engineering • Some users make massive corporate investment to incorporate these standards into their business processes. • They want stability, not revision.

7. Disadvantages of the Proposed Change (1) • Required revisions will encourage the incorporation of small changes causing needless expense for current users. • It has been suggested that revision might only change the date on the cover. • However, such a revision would have all the same problems that are currently cited for reaffirmation.

8. Disadvantages of the Proposed Change (2) • Unnecessary workload on volunteers. • Example: • S2ESC has forty-some standards. • A ten-year life would require, on average, a revision of four per year. • Since the average project lasts 2-3 years, 8 to 12 revisions would be ongoing at any given time – solely to satisfy the requirement for revision. • This subtracts from the leadership pool available to revise standards that truly need it. • Placing effort on unneeded revision projects versus needed revision projects increases our risk.

9. Disadvantages of the Proposed Change (3) • The proposed change removes the category of stabilized standards. • These are typically old technologies that remain useful in limited circumstance. • It would be difficult to assemble a working group to revise. • It should be up to the users to judge whether their circumstances are appropriate for use of a “stabilized” standard.

10. Disadvantages of the Proposed Change (4) • Some IEEE standards are joint with other organizations—organizations that retain a concept of reaffirmation. • A revision that “changes the date on the cover” would invalidate the joint publication. • One would suspect that the other organization will continue to sell the standard with the “old” date on the cover. • How would this affect our risk?

11. Disadvantages of the Proposed Change (5) • Reaffirmation is the best available approach for revalidating a standard against which a claim has been made. • Suppose a claim is made that a standard is dangerous. • Reaffirmation permits turning the question over to a balloting group of experts. • Removing reaffirmation leaves the Standards Board with only unsatisfactory choices: • Ignore the claim • Ask the sponsor to investigate—with uncertain results • Arbitrarily declare the standard “inactive” • Removing reaffirmation increases our risk

12. Are there Problems with Retaining Reaffirmation? • Yes, there are. A better reaffirmation process is needed. • But the current proposal only covers up the risk problem, it doesn’t actually treat it. In fact, it increases our risk by removing our current best option for revalidating a standard that has been questioned.

13. IEEE Computer Society Position • The IEEE Computer Society’s Standards Activities Board has reviewed the recent proposal to change IEEE-SA Bylaws and both Operations Manual to replace the current reaffirmation and stabilization processes with an extended ten-year non-renewable life span for all new or revised standards. • The Computer Society SAB opposes the proposed change. • Reaffirmation is a very useful process for technologies that change slowly and should remain as an available alternative for maintenance of standards. It is true that there are problems with the current reaffirmation process, but these problems can be addressed with smaller changes to existing procedures.

14. Summary of White Paper (1) • Reaffirmation is highly useful for standards providing principles and standards dealing with slowly evolving technology. • Reaffirmation is highly useful for standards that require large investment for conformance, hence high value in stability. • Reaffirmation is highly useful for revalidating the continued currency and correctness of a standard after questions have been raised concerning its content. The proposed process provides no replacement for this usage.

15. Summary of White Paper (2) • The proposed process for providing minimal revision (such as changing the date on the cover) retains all the risks of the current reaffirmation process, hence solves nothing. • The proposed process induces unnecessary volunteer workload to revise standards which are completely satisfactory. This will drain the volunteer base needed to perform substantive revision of standards that actually need it. • The proposed process will make it impossible to align standards with other organizations, such as ISO and IEC, which retain a process corresponding to reaffirmation.

16. Summary of White Paper (3) • The IEEE CS SAB agrees that there are problems in the current method for reaffirmation and requests the IEEE-SA to produce a proposal that deals with those problems in a more satisfactory manner. • In particular, proposals for separating the reaffirmation process into two phases – issue raising and decision making – seem promising.