QUALITY ISSUES IN IT INDUSTRY OF PAKISTAN

Group
Fa-2011/M. Sc. EM/018 Khan Fa-2011/M.Sc. EM/053 Sp-2012/M. Sc. EM/001 Muhammad Aatif Saif Muhammad Bakhsh Sial Mudassar Ali Fayyaz

INTRODUCTION
Pakistans IT industrys tremendous promise is marred by plethora of issues including but not limited to product, process and quality at the core level and soft issues like employee satisfaction and management competence concerns. According to PSEB, out of approximately 1500 registered companies, only 110 ISO 9001, 23 CMMI and 11 ISO 27001 certified companies It demands faculties to evaluating key areas that need continuous and continual improvements for reducing losses incurred due to poor requirements capturing, reactive approach to the inherent risks in project management, poor coding quality directly impacting the employee

SCHEME OF PRESENTATION
Introduction Factors considered Data analysis Deductions from Findings Conclusion
Muhammad Aatif Saif Khan
Mudassar Ali Fayyaz

Col. Muhammad Bakhsh Sial

FACTORS
Processes Software Development methodologies Requirements Gathering TQM in Software Development Employee Satisfaction Role of Management

PROCESSES
Recipe for quality software resides in the maturity of processes & embracing standards at organizational level Well defined and truly implemented processes result in conformance to specifications & customer satisfaction On the contrary, poorly defined processes, non-existence of QMS, management oversight and lack of business acumen lead to utter disaster in terms of reputation & business

SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT METHODOLOGIES

Software industry has gone through meteoric changes and many models of software development life cycle (SDLC) have emerged in last three decades. Few prefer adopting classical waterfall model but more aggressive organisations have moved towards agile development cycle (employing self-organizing, crossfunctional teams).

SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT METHODOLOGIES

REQUIREMENTS GATHERING
Fundamental objective is listening to Voice of the Customer and translating them into Voice of the Engineer emanating into conformance to customer requirements It shall happen through qualified business analysts (BAs) having sound domain knowledge under a Functional Lead & in close consultation with Technical Lead Unfortunately, in Pakistan, companies try to save on resource cost by employing software developers for requirements gathering. It results into half-backed and partially captured requirements since technical resources seldom correctly

TQM IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

McCall, Richards, and Walters were the first to study the concept of software quality in terms of quality factors and quality criteria. Software firms pay less attention to quality assurance as it is frequently the first area that is cut back when deadlines are missed (Miller, 2007). TQM concept represents a fundamental change in the definition and treatment of quality in product development. It has redefined the quality as Everyones Business Software companies planning to implement TQM must have critical mass of employees

EMPLOYEE SATISFACTION
Employee satisfaction is often linked to career advancement opportunities, challenging nature of work, salary & other employee benefits, positive work environment, flexibility in work schedule / telecommuting, training / educational opportunities and many more factors. Due to lack of measures at government level, IT industry has shrunk in last few years resulting into cut-downs in employee salaries

ROLE OF MANAGEMENT
Management has a principal role in ensuring time, cost, scope and quality of software, through well-defined processes, team work, and empowerment during the software development life cycle. Project management decisions are often tricky precisely because they involve tradeoffs based on fuzzy or incomplete knowledge. Furthermore, bad project management decisions, such as hiring too few programmers or picking the wrong type of contract can put an organization in poor

DATA ANALYSIS

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Software houses in Islamabad were approached based on convenient sampling technique for seeking their inputs. Quantitative analysis would be perform in order to measure the quality issues of IT industry of Pakistan. We could gathering information related to: Issues in software quality practices. Employee satisfaction effects on software quality. Role of Project management on software quality.

QUESTIONERS
Questioners included likert scale questions, ordinal scale and simple Boolean questions Questions include mostly structured questions from past research papers and software metrics, measurement related books whose references are given at the end of paper Metrics and Models in Software Quality Engineering, 2nd (2002) Effectiveness and relevance of software documentation by Andrew Forward, University of Ottawa.

SAMPLE DESCRIPTION
24 organizations agreed to provide access to their employees. Out of 250 sources requested for filling survey questionnaire, 100 individuals with varying service experience and qualification provided feedback Organizations included small, medium as well as large IT companies. Position of the candidate also varied From juniors developers with one year experience, to senior developers more than one year experience, Project managers, Program Manager, Software Testing Analyst ,Software Quality Assurance Engineer CEOs. IT support

SOFTWARE QUALITY PROCESSES

Separate department for software quality Software Methodologies frequencies stacked bar chart
Mean Spiral Increment al Rolling Wave Waterfall Agile None 1.86 2.13 2.14 2.35 2.09 2.03 Median 1 1 1 1 1 1
Legion
1Never 2To some extent 3Not sure 4Mostly 5Always

Mode 1 1 1 1 1 1

Importance of difference requirement frequency

CONTINUED
Frequency of extent to which different best practices are development
Practices

Legion
1Never 2To some extent 3Not sure followed in software 4Mostly 5Always N Mean Median Mode Std. Varian Deviati ce Valid Missing on 89 91 93 88 89 92 85 91 89 93 90 89 4 4.1123 6 2 2.4157 3 0 3.4606 74 5 2.7640 45 4 2.9887 64 1 3.2022 47 8 2 2 2.9101 12 4 2.6404 49 0 2.9662 92 3 2.8764 04 4 2.4157 3 5 2 4 2 3 4 1 3 2 3 3 2 5 1.5108 2.2826 56 86 1 1.6082 2.5865 81 68 5 1.6100 2.5921 27 86 1 1.6990 2.8868 8 74 5 1.6271 2.6476 45 4 1.5824 2.5040 3 86 1 1.3399 1.7954 46 55 1 1.6558 2.7418 47 28 1 1.5900 2.5283 77 45 1 1.5986 2.5556 46 69 5 1.6154 2.6095 1 51 1 1.6153 2.6092 31 95

Use source control (ie. CVS system) Have daily builds Maintain a bug database Follow any coding standards Fix bugs before writing new code Keep an up-to-date schedule Reviews at appropriate intervals by management Have a specifications document for your project Have new candidates for the development team write code Develop test strategy Follow the test strategy Perform extensive test which includes unit

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Manager with management related education

CONTINUED

Frequencies of importance of project management practices

CONTINUED
Frequency of different cases being rated by the managers
Stability of software over new feature from client Importance of process over ad hoc method of development to meet demand Valid Missing Mean 38 40 Median Mode Std. Deviati on 3.00.89887 3.001.4887 0

3 2.0526 2.0000 2 3.0000 3.0000

Separate testers over same employee performing testing and development

39

2 2.2105 1.0000

1.001.6134 2

Special training session over developer selflearning Importance of having experience developer over fresh graduates or less experiences

34

7 3.1176 3.0000

5.001.9031 8 1.001.5375 8

38

3 2.4737 2.5000

Commitment towards quality vs. time

37

4 2.5789 3.0000

1.001.5876 5

EMPLOYEE SATISFACTION
Why employee chose to stay with current employers

Employee rating different aspect about current job

DEDUCTIONS FROM ANALYSIS

LACK OF DIVERSITY
Male : Female ratio indicates lesser preference for women folk due to cultural issues Male are considered for employment because of their flexibility for travelling and late sitting option.

LACK OF TRAININGS
Training of any sort is lacking Employees have to learn themselves mostly Large software houses are more likely to provide trainings to their employees Sense of complacency results in lack of touch with emerging trends and knowledge domains

QUALITY IS NOT GIVEN ITS DUE PLACE

No organisation in totality has grasped the concept of TQM or QA. The near absence of quality in software development results in faulty product Tight financial position leading to use of developers as quality control staff Lack of realization on part of management

ABSENCE OF RIGHT MAN FOR THE RIGHT JOB

Software developers are additionally employed in the roles of business analysts and QA staff. Not hiring and employing the qualified and experienced staff ultimately results in budgetary overshoot, lost time leading to failed projects Large organizations are more likely to address this aspect than small organizations

WORK ENVIRONMENT & RESOURCE ACCESS

Employees satisfaction about resources available is attributed to: Flexibility in work schedule Desk based needs - an IT person only needs a machine, internet and loads of work

SALARY ISSUES
Dissatisfaction of employees in small medium software houses is linked to salary structures and delayed salaries payments. However, in companies with bigger portfolio and running concerns, the employees were found satisfied about pay structure and timely disbursal. Employees also notified that they are not compensated often for their extra work in terms of overtime.

Q&A
"The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. (Linus Pauling)

WHY SOFTWARE ENGINEERING ? The problem is complexity Many sources, but size is key: UNIX contains 4 million lines of code Windows 2000 contains 108 lines of code Software engineering is about managing this complexity.

CONCLUSION
Pakistans IT industry has to make their grounds through focused and continual efforts for improving quality throughout life of a software development life cycle. The culture of total quality management would help in reducing costs, improving quality of the product leading to customer satisfaction, thus increased returns on investment.