The Hindu Business Line : On convergence track

Four aspects of software quality are converging, and these are business excellence, service excellence, security, and information integrity, say Kamna Malik and Praveen Choudhary in Software Quality: A Practitioner’s Approach ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com). They find that at present, each of these aspects is dealt with separately.

“The CEOs talk about business excellence; the marketing force talks about customer service and convenience; network professionals talk about network security; DBAs are for data security, and information systems experts for information integrity.”

With time, all these divergent aspects will need to be addressed by software providers, and will thus become ingredients of the software quality definition, the authors foresee.

“Software designers/engineers will need to use local languages for addressing local contextual problems of users. They will also need to take the help of cognitive and behavioural sciences in order to make their design structures (designed by a handful of experts) understandable to masses who will implement the same.”

Taking a ‘step forward,’ Malik and Choudhary predict that UI (universal identifier) may become the norm instead of individual names. “All kinds of numbers we carry on various plastic cards will become redundant. The UI will allow use of all civic services such as phone, water, road, hospital, bank…”

In such a scenario, they expect portability, interoperability, data security, availability, reliability, correctness, usability, and such currently optional quality attributes to become mandatory. “With quality software products around, life will get much easier for performers; miserable for defaulters; transparent for governance and critical for integration solution and service providers.”

Good read.

Coping with ‘information anarchy’

Organisations, which generally like structure and predictability, may see the Internet as ‘a sort of information anarchy’ posing reputation challenges. “The Internet has become a powerful medium for anti-corporate messages,” writes Andrew Griffin in New Strategies for Reputation Management ( www.vivagroupindia.com).

“With posted material remaining live indefinitely, information becomes basically ‘timeless.’ If you Google for Nike, you will be just one click away from the ‘Boycott Nike’ site.”

When almost ‘one in every three teenagers’ already generates online content, the company’s own official corporate Web site is suddenly just one of many voices battling for a share of voice about itself and its reputation, the author observes.

Companies are trying, therefore, to cope with the Net challenge by setting up blogs and hosting discussion rooms about their businesses or brands. But that only elicits a chuckle from Griffin; because corporate efforts remind him of ‘middle-aged people trying to be down with the kids and entering a world with which they are basically uncomfortable.’

Though there are no easy answers to how the Net has to be managed by companies, the author sees quality and quantity as the key variables. “Better information is preferable to just more information, both for the company and its intended audience.”

Recommended study.

Design of experiments

More than 15 years ago, a labour team in Motorola was trying to improve a wave solder process that was running at a defect level of 10,000 ppm for poor solderability. “The team’s very ambitious goal was to reduce the defect level to 200 ppm – a 50:1 improvement… The team decided on a Full Factorial experiment…”

Thus reads one of the many examples in World Class Quality, second edition ( www.jaicobooks.com), by Keki R. Bhote and Adi K. Bhote. Another case study is about moiré effect minimisation in a new development of a computer monitor. “Known as a scan moiré, the problem is a wavy pattern caused by the shadow mask pattern and the horizontal line pattern,” the authors explain.

For the shop-floor avid who would like to try out the DOE (design of experiments) approach.

Network gyan

The phrase ‘traffic policing’ may remind you of cops on the road, but as a network term it refers to the controlling of traffic through an interface. “Policing drops traffic, whereas shaping buffers it for sending later,” explain Denise Donohue, Brent Stewart and Jerold Swan in CCNP Quick Reference ( www.ciscopress.com).

Both traffic policing and traffic shaping use a token bucket concept to measure the amount of bandwidth allowed, the authors add. “Enough tokens enter the bucket at regular intervals to allow the interface to send the number of bytes configured for that interval.”

When talking of congestion avoidance, Donohue et al introduce readers to two phrases, viz. TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) synchronisation, and TCP starvation. The former occurs when all TCP packets exiting an interface are repeatedly dropped.

“At each tail drop, each session goes into slow start, and then ramps up its sending rate. When the interface queue fills, all packets are dropped again, and all sessions reduce their sending again. Eventually this results in waves of increased and decreased transmission, causing underutilisation of the interface.”

And, if you are hungering to know when TCP starvation occurs, it is “when large flows, with increased window sizes, fill the interface queue. Packets from smaller or less aggressive flows are then dropped.”

Elsewhere in the book, you would read about IIN (intelligent information network) which describes “an evolutionary vision of a network that integrates network and application functionality cooperatively and allows the network to be smart about how it handles traffic to minimise the footprint of applications.”

Suggested addition to the techie’s shelf.

Hail software!

“Hitherto, wealth was acquired by breaking laws or at least bending them to one’s convenience; software was the first instance where wealth was created honestly and legally, and, more important, visibly so,” opines Ashish Arora in one of the essays included in Sustaining India’s Growth Miracle edited by Jagdish N. Bhagwati and Charles W. Calomiris ( www.ravemedia.in). Software made the ‘Brand India’ a respected one, paving the way for other sectors, Arora avers.

“The software industry led the fight for regulatory reforms, in areas such as liberalising access to the stock market and listing requirements. It also led the way in corporate governance, with their emphasis on transparency and ethical management.”

The author draws attention to the aggressive acquisition of local business by multinational companies.

“For example, the ten-year deal between Accenture and Dabur for management of Dabur’s IT needs, the Bank of India-HP deal for branch office computerisation, $750-million Bharti-IBM deal, and both the mega-Reliance Infocomm telecom network and the Reliance retail-petrol-pump projects with IBM are clear indicators of what can happen in the Indian landscape.”

According to Arora, the weakness of Indian companies is in the area of hardware and system integration capability. He contrasts our situation with that of China, where local business is almost exclusively the preserve of local firms, “all of which are incredibly diversified and none of which are internationally competitive.”

Prescribed for a perusal of the different perspectives the editors bring together.

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

Tailpiece

“Despite answering official mails from my car and my bed, I manage to maintain my work-life balance.”

“How?”

“By switching on the ‘out of office reply’ option when at work!”