In an interaction with CIOL, Dr. Bill said that if the quality is compromised, the performance of the software gets slower and it affects the work-process.
“It is very expensive for a company to work with slow software, and fixing the problem is again costly. Software can often be fixed by following the standard measures for the structural quality. It is very important to go deep and know how the software is engineered and built,” he said.
“For instance,” he said, “while we talk to an architect, we explain to him how the house should look like and what should be the dimensions of the hall and room etc., but we never ask him what should be the weight of the wall. Likewise, users can explain software developers that how many functions they want, but they can’t explain how it should be built. They expect it to be known by the software developers beforehand,” he said.
Bill said that CISQ is in talks with more than 20 IT companies in India like TCS and they are in favour of having a global software standard.
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Dr Bill is of the view that IT companies need to achieve security, reliability and maintainability. “If they don’t give much attention to these problems, they will have to go back and fix the problems coming up frequently and it will be a huge financial burden on them. IT companies are aware of the process and they know that there will be major problems with their software in future.”
He added their main concern is that they could not deal with multiple ways to measure the reliability, as each company has a different way to measure the performance and reliability.
So many people, including freshers, are coming into the software industry without sufficient domain knowledge, and some don’t have the same level of software engineering training, he pointed out.
“We have many people coming into the software industry who do not have computer science background. Even if the candidate is from a computer science background, they still don’t know the domain, structural quality and architecture of the software. So the measurement of the structural quality of the software gets diminished without proper insight,” Dr Bill said.
He said the system is very complex. There are multi languages and no single key can hold all the features. “We always stress to have one language and one technology. We are making a section about how to write a code and automate the process which can detect any problem with the software,” he added.
In terms of opportunities available, there are many companies who outsource their core software development work to India and Philippines because of the good engineering talent available here.
Major industry players such as GM, AXA, US Department of Homeland Security, IBM, Capgemini and TCS are driving this forward to ensure the standard can, and will, be applied in practice.
CISQ has development teams all over the world, who are working on the same application.
“We are working towards one standard common language, common understanding of the good practice, common measures. The vision of the global software development and maintenance is going to be re-sized, we can’t have different people in different parts of the world working on different parameters. So we just have to drive the process,” he said.
Technical debt
The term 'technical debt' has come out in the age of technology; if there is a minor problem with the software, we tend to ignore it but we know that someday we have to fix it. If the software runs slower we spend a lot of time getting work done until somebody fixes it. We have technical debt happening across the world across many systems. Fixing these problems is more expensive than following a uniform software standard.
“The purpose of CISQ is to standardize the structural measures of the software (maintainability and reliability). CISQ has adopted an international standard and not a different version for software. We went to the software engineering institute and have taken up the challenge of building standardized measures of the major software at the level we can compute the software at the codes,” he added.
CISQ is organizing its first meeting in India with intent to create awareness on CISQ Executive Forum in India and highlight the role played by CISQ in propagating the mission-critical importance of IT application quality.
It is developing a consistent quality measurement system that can be used by IT and business leaders to measure and report on the software quality of multi-tier business applications.