India, a low-cost 'quality' destination

As VP of quality at IBM Global Services India, Dr Asha Goyal, strives to push for quality of software process within the company and beyond. Her book titled 'CMMI, Implementation: Embarking on High Maturity Practices', co-authored by Dr Shivraj Kanungo, who heads the Information Science department at George Washington University, was released at the recently held NASSCOM Quality Summit 2004 in Bangalore.

To add to her laurels, she has notched up a first for India and IBM by winning the International Woman of Color in Technology award (category of career achievement) for 2004. In an interview with Priya Sreenivas of CyberMedia News, she shared her views on the quality movement and her award.

This is an award called the 'Woman of Color in Technology' award given every year to non-Caucasian achievers in the IT industry. I have been chosen as the woman of the year this time in the overall category. The award presenters look for qualities such as education, career, achievements, community work and ability to take on challenges. I will be receiving the award at a function in Atlanta, Georgia in late October.






On IBM's maintenance and support model

The Maintenance and Support (M&S) model is something we have brought out on the quality front on behalf of India and NASSCOM for the International Software Benchmarking & Standards Group (ISBSG). This is a business area where India is doing a lot of work, which has not been represented yet. So we came up with this model to show companies how to use it for improving their processes. The software lifecycle consists of conceptualization, bringing to market where it stays for sometime, maintenance, enhancement and then replacement. Generally around 20 percent of the product lifecycle lies in the development phase, while 80 percent of the time, it is in the market. Over time, it needs to be supported, maintained and tweaked a little. A lot of time is spent in sorting out problems, or in other words, support. India does a lot of this. There are many parameters that affect this area such as different customers, various platforms and other factors that are not easy to measure. There are no standards available for this in the public domain. We hope that our initiative would help the industry in future.






Quality translates into results

When a company follows good procedures and institutionalization is in place, it means that processes are improving. Defect rates are reduced and adherence to tasks, time, production and efficiency increases. In addition, there is also an improvement in people's skills.

The focus towards quality has been continuously increasing since the last seven to eight years. India has always been known as low-cost 'quality' destination and I think it will always remain the same.

On her book

I have found that most books on CMMI address theory and leave it at that. Important experiential insights such as how to go about it, the people aspect and how to organize the work, is not written about. The book that I have authored is written more from appraise angle-right from the organization's point of view to myths, roadblocks, what to expect and different ways of doing it. I have also talked about what to expect and how to plan for the implementation.