Can I Rely On that Software?

In an amazingly short period of time, software has become

critical to almost every aspect of what we do in the financial services world.

From checking your account's balance on your bank's internet portal to

purchasing that Christmas gift online, from withdrawing grocery money from the

ATM to purchasing that stock which will be the star in your portfolio. A number

of sophisticated software systems are involved in managing the complexity of

transactions such as these.

At a time when choices abound, the end customer tends to be

an extremely unforgiving animal. According to an estimate, the financial

services industry could be loosing a staggering $6.5 mn per hour in brokerage

operations, and $2.4 mn per hour in credit card sales applications due to

dysfunctional websites. Page load times in excess of 8 seconds, could cause as

many as 30% of online buyers to abandon the transaction. The combined losses of

these problems could be a staggering $362 million a month! Talk about direct

impact of software quality to your business!

There are two more dimensions of this issue-first is the

compelling cost benefit of outsourcing application software development to IT

services vendors in India, China or other locations.

A second dimension of this issue is related to how testing

is handled in general. A recent survey conducted amongst CIOs by a leading

industry analyst identified broad consensus on the belief that quality assurance

is undervalued and under-invested in. This typically manifests itself in the

following ways:

• Lack of formal test planning including identification
  
  of quality goals and metrics, testing methods/tools, professional services
  
  from testing experts, harnesses, etc.

• Lack of a decision making framework for senior
  
  management. Imagine having to make a decision about whether to go live with
  
  the application or to invest more on testing without a set of metrics that
  
  show the cost-benefits of these actions.

• Pushing a formal testing phase to the end of the
  
  development cycle. Most testing done until this phase is ad-hoc and
  
  engineering-oriented rather than user-oriented.

• Ignoring several types of non-functional tests such as
  
  white-box and performance testing. This can result in software crashes or
  
  performance bottlenecks.

Both these dimensions conspire to create application

software that can be very expensive to maintain. Research indicates that IT

organizations could be spending an astounding 50% of their budgets on fixing

bugs that should've ideally been found and fixed during the acceptance

testing. It is no secret that a defect which would cost $1 to fix during

development could cost several thousands of dollars to fix when identified in

production.

Despite these risks, application software continues

developed more or less the same way as it was decades earlier. However, there

are a chosen few IT organizations within the financial services world that are

approaching application software development in a different manner.

To begin with, they work to incorporate several key quality

assurance activities in a development cycle up-front. Teams developing large

application software spend as much time on identifying quality goals as they do

on product functionality. This includes identifying a set of metrics that the

cross-functional team (engineering, IT management, executive management) can use

to monitor progress in quality of the application under development.

Companies that deploy a more mature approach to quality

management are likely to reap rewards in terms of delivering more stable system

performance and reduced post-production support cost. In our experience of

working with companies to help them make a transition to a development process

that integrates quality in every aspect of engineering, we've noted up to 10

times reduction in such costs.

Finally, no improvement comes without its cost just as no

benefit comes in a single area.

Sashi Reddi,

CEO, VisualSoft



mail@dqindia.com