Congratulations to the winners of the 2026 Jean-Claude Laprie Award in Dependable Computing. An initiative of IFIP Working Group 10.4, the 2026 award were unanimous in their selection of the following paper:
Ram Chillarege, Inderpal S. Bhandari, Jarir K. Chaar, Michael J. Halliday, Diane S. Moebus, Bonnie K. Ray, and Man-Yuen Wong. 1992. Orthogonal Defect Classification – A Concept for In-Process Measurements. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 18(11), 943-956. https://doi.org/10.1109/32.177364
The Award Citation:
“Orthogonal Defect Classification – A Concept for In-Process Measurements”, by Ram Chillarege, Inderpal S. Bhandari, Jarir K. Chaar, Michael J. Halliday, Diane S. Moebus, Bonnie K. Ray, and Man-Yuen Wong, was the first paper to demonstrate how defects can be used as in‑process measurements to make software development measurable and controllable.
At the time of publication, there was a challenging gap between statistical modeling, which often occurred too late in the development process, and causal analysis techniques that were costly and unsuitable for quantitative analysis.
The paper bridged the gap by introducing a classification scheme and a corresponding framework for defect types and defect triggers, making it easy for software engineers to correctly identify the most likely class. Each development process tends to exhibit a particular defect-type distribution for each process phase. Measuring and classifying defect types thus also allows for the quick identification of divergence between the actual development and the intended development process. A similar effect is described for defect triggers, conditions that allow defects to surface.
The paper demonstrated the classification and measurement framework on several industrial use cases. Since its publication, Orthogonal Defect Classification (ODC) has had a tremendous impact on industry, driving improvements in efficiency and reliability. Indeed, it has demonstrated significant, sometimes dramatic improvements in productivity and efficiency, and many companies have highlighted the impact of ODC on their developments. Among others, these companies are IBM, Nortel, and Motorola.
As ODC was adopted across many organisations worldwide, the cumulative effect on efficiency across organisations and projects was substantial. ODC has also had a significant scientific impact, with about 1,200 citations according to Google Scholar. As software engineering paradigms shifted from Waterfall to Spiral and then to Agile, ODC continued to work, underscoring its foundational character. More recently, machine learning research has leveraged the structure and reasoning models ODC established. For these reasons, the award =committee decided to select this paper as the 2026 JCL award winner.
About the Jean-Claude Laprie Award
The Jean-Claude Laprie Award in Dependable Computing has been awarded annually in his honour since 2012 by the IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance. It recognises outstanding papers that have significantly influenced the theory and/or practice of Dependable Computing. It takes the form of a memorial plaque presented to the author(s) at the Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN).
Any paper relating to dependable and secure computing and published at least 10 years prior to the award year (e.g., 2016 or earlier for the 2026 award) is eligible for the award.
The award seeks to recognise papers that have had a significant impact in the intervening years in one or more of the three following categories:
- Technical/scientific research impact
- Industrial/commercial product impact
- Broad impact on the dependable computing community
DSN-2026 Jean-Claude Laprie Award Committee
The committed is chaired by Wilfried Steiner of TTTech Computertechnik AG, Austria, and also includes:
- Yair Amir, Johns Hopkins University, USA
- Andrea Bondavalli, University of Florence, Italy
- Xavier Défago, Institute of Science Tokyo, Japan
- Elias Duarte, Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil
- Mohamed Kaaniche, LAAS‑CNRS, France
Citations and complete information on the Jean-Claude Laprie Award can be found on the web page: http://jclaprie-award.dependability.org/