Information Technology Reference
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at these two different places. For instance, primary steel is produced at steel pro-
duction plants through manufacturing activities. Suppose that at two such plants
machines and capacities are the same. But can you say that activities performed at
the two plants are exactly the same? No! There will always be some differences that
cause costs and quality of the product or service to differ.
For this reason, many businesses resort to benchmarking. A team from one
organization visits and observes activities being performed at another organization.
This other organization acts as a role model for the first organization. The team
from the first organization documents their observations. They come back to their
own organization and compare activities performed at their organization to what
is being done at the other organization. Later on, they change their own activities
and implement what they observed at the other organization. This process is called
benchmarking. So effectively they are benchmarking their own activities against
the activities being performed at the other organization.
There are many benefits to benchmarking. It can be considered a step above
standardization. Definitely benchmarking can provide more value to organizations
after they have standardized their processes.
13.2.2
Six Sigma
Six sigma quality methodology was first practiced at Motorola; the quality control
department started the initiative to reduce the number of defects in the products
by introducing quality control measures in the production process. They identi-
fied champions from the people who were working in different process areas in
the production process. The task of these champions was to identify problem areas
related to quality of the products being produced and take actions to remove these
problems. This helped in reducing the number of defects getting introduced in the
products. This improved the quality of products and at the same time helped to
reduce scrap and rework.
Six sigma methods have been successfully introduced in software develop-
ment processes.
1...
Software Development Process Quality
Software development activities are a service. The outcome of software develop-
ment is a software product or software application. The quality of this application
or product can be measured to a large extent (see
Figure 13.1).
Before discussing many details of the software development process and its relation
to quality, standards, methodologies, and measurements, let us ask some questions:
◾
Do we need to measure the software development process?
◾
What are the needs of measuring any software development process?
