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Quality--> Quality Paradigm
Quality Paradigm


How does quality retain a customer in the first place?. Good quality work in any industry means that the service/product offered meets the need of the buyer. This is translated into time and cost parameters for the buyer. Any organization which can   give quality time and quality cost to its customer at a sustainable volume and cost for itself will be successful. This, in a nutshell, is the paradigm behind offshore software development.

In the software industry, quality is dependent fundamentally on three factors - the process of development, quality of people and the technology used. When these factors are appropriately used, good quality ensures as seen in case of several successful software ventures. 

Critical Areas of Quality 

We have identified the following business areas of Critical Areas of Quality importance:

1) In Execution software projects

Pre-development activities which involves:

  • Study and record client's requirements
  • Assess risks, estimate effort and cost, and submit proposal
  • Review contract
  • Finalize contract
  • Initiate project

2) Managing projects which involves:

  • Preparation and review of plans (project management, quality management, test, configuration management)
  • Periodic review of progress, project status, risks and best practices implementation
  • Execute project as per contract/plan which could involve:
    • Preparation of detailed software requirements specifications
    • Preparation of detailed design document and program specifications
    • Coding and unit testing
    • System and Integration testing
    • Support for acceptance testing
    • Providing post-implementation warranty support
  • Obtain feedback from client

3) In Provide on-site software consultancy services

  • Understand and record client's requirements
  • Match available skills with client's requirement
  • Select candidates.
  • Submit proposal to client and finalize order/contract
  • Allocate personnel and provide on-site services
  • Update skills database.

Other processes like recruitment, resource allocation, network and system administration, invoicing and training also leave impact on quality improvement process.

 

This is the fundamental strategy of the famous SEI-CMM model of development. Let us see how these factors affect the time and cost parameters .

Lack of Quality 

It is estimated that time taken for completing a software project overshoots its target in 80% cases. How is time lost on a project ?  Time maybe lost in several ways. Some of them are

  1. Lack of proper requirement understanding - when the original specifications are not covered because of one reason or other.
  2. Lack of change request tracking and version control
  3. Lack of build management and distributed file synchronization
  4. Improper naming conventions which lead to non-trace ability of versions of files and documents.
Software Configuration Management

To avoid such problems we advice clients to establish certain basic parameters at the beginning within which the project is defined and understood. This is called as software configuration management. It implies requirements management, establishing integrity rules for maintaining data, development environment, standards and rules set for the entire project as well as its conduct, receivables and deliverables at every stage of the project. Any changes to the project are recorded and its effect on the configuration of the project is measured each time. Procedures for documenting the project too are decided at this stage. In a nutshell, the context and environment of the project  is first gathered.

Software Development Management

"Where there is no vision, people perish" is a popular quote from the bible. Software projects often prove this to be true when development is done without proper analysis and design. Yet other times, analysis forgets to document the limitations and unknown areas of the project which leads to loss of time later. This is more so when the incremental model of development is used..

A properly documented design document takes care of such problems. They contain all the stages of development based on requirements gathered in the previous stage. All issues are documented as they arise, and using the integrity rules, these are maintained between the client and the developer. Since the issues are well defined here, it becomes possible to manage risk as well as forecast dates and estimate time and cost of the project. In cases where ad-hoc development is the only way to come up with a good output, a prototype may be more useful.

Consequently good functionality specs are available, which makes the job of the developer easy since the task is well defined. Typically at this level of progress the system design, functionality specification, user requirements and analysis report are in place. Such a scheduled development plan is  the output of the software development management stage. 

Tracking Your Project

At this level of development it is easy to come up with a Planning and Tracking document to show the deadlines and time estimates of each task. The configuration management stage would have also defined the format in which the reporting and tracking is done. A innovative approach is to use the web as a medium for reporting as well as for document viewing, design and analysis. Again integrity rules are followed in the planning and reporting documents too.




 
 
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