The 3 types of process

We are all (all too) familiar with the ISO standards, CMMI levels and so on. All of these prescribe excellent processes and the benefits of which we are all realizing. At the same time, there are projects and organization that feel that some of the processes are not optimal for them. Maybe its an overhead? True - there is a discipline called Tailoring, but it is also one of the least understood processes from CMMI..after QPM that is!

Many organizations struggle to implement CMMI. After spending thousands of dollars in planning, assessment (and celebrating L5 with a party and gifts), within a few months, they are back to where they started. The biggest reason for this is the "ALL for ALL" approach. All processes for all projects. How do we change this and what can be a model to achieve this?

There are only 2 primary purpose to processes. One is Risk mitigation and Second is Improvements. We will call risk mitigation processes as "Safety" and one that gives improvements as "Premium". To make the decision making simple for us, we will add a third category - "Foundation". The purpose of this grouping is described below:

How does this categorization help implementation and tailoring? Will this be useful to realize full value of processes? We will see in next blog.

Quality Wishes - the seven notes of quality

How can Software quality professionals change the face of quality and software quality assurance in 2011? Inspired by ASQ initiative of Quality goals for 1022, here is my list of 7 wishes for software quality and hope that we can work towards these!

Wish # 1: Audits do not unearth mistakes. Only improvements - This calls for a mindset change in audits. Correcting mistakes do lead to improvement, but would it not be better to shift the focus and look for improvements rather than mistakes?

Wish # 2: We don’t make the same mistake twice - There is an age old saying, “Make only new mistakes”. In the context of an organization, we can safely assume that only the mistake first made anywhere within the organization counts as the new one. Do we believe that the mistakes we make are always new? Or do we try to find out mistakes made earlier and not repeat them…

Wish # 3: We reach a CoQ of 25% - We are happy to test less and save money for our clients. 

Wish # 4: A project award is instituted for the project that failed badly after trying – Should we not give reward for taking risks and creating learning’s?

Wish # 5: A working code is not the only goal - Meeting all functional requirements is probably less than 25% in a project. Making the application live up to performance requirements, maintainability (less time to maintain), usability (easy to use), secure will have to be of utmost importance.

Wish # 6: Project data is treated like money. We don’t waste it - There is no compromise made in project data – be it effort, defects, size, schedule, Requirements etc.. Will anyone accept 1 dollar as 90 cents?

Wish # 7: Customers don’t set SLAs. We set them – Performance standards are set by projects and we constantly beat them. No more waiting for some else to tell us what is quality!

My goal for 2011 would be to start working on realizing these goals in my work. Hopefully I can share updates a couple of months down the line!