Look Beyond CMM

Quality consultant Tom Gilb minces no words when he says that Indian companies

should get over their obsession with the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). This

seems strange coming from a person acknowledged to be responsible for some of

the aspects of IEEE and CMM Level 4.

His stance is that CMM has become commoditized since most Indian software

companies today boast of achieving these quality benchmarks. "It was the

right strategy for Indian companies to take up CMM since it differentiated them

from their Western counterparts. But now, when it's a commodity, Indian

companies should look at bringing business results to the customer," he

says. He suggests companies to go for a value-for-cost strategy, rather than CMM

Level 5.

Speaking to CyberMedia News, he said that while CMM contains a lot of good

features, it also tends to get bureaucratic. Gilb reckons that Indian companies

should do more than software engineering, and get into systems engineering:

"One way to get five times more business would be to do systems

engineering. India should seriously consider systems engineering to get a better

piece of the cake."

He warns that with the Chinese threat looming, Indian software companies

simply cannot afford to ignore the benefits of delivering good business results

to customers. "It is a case of eat or be eaten. There is a need for

leadership from the Indian industry and also the government," he says. He

urges companies to get into systems engineering across various engineering

disciplines and get more high-end.

Gilb has written a book titled Competitive Engineering: A Handbook for

Systems Engineering, Requirements Engineering and Software Engineering Using

Planguage. A large portion of his book delves on how companies need to quantify

the goals of their projects. "It is a cultural problem. Instead of saying

that you would deliver 'innovative design', one has to be able to quantify

it," he says. He suggests that innovative design could be quantified in

terms of the number of patentable designs and productivity (number of designs).

Navyug Mohnot, CEO, QAI India, disagrees with Glib's view that Indian

companies tend to over-focus on CMM standards. "Look at India's software

exports performance. We record 32% year-on-year growth every year. This is

largely due to the industry's quality focus."

Nasscom president Kiran Karnik said that the industry body was looking at

quality standards like CMM that could be applied in a better way to Indian

outsourcing companies. "Outsourcing makes it a little difficult to

integrate various aspects of processes since they are spread across wide."

CyberMedia News