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When the software market started becoming competitive, the focus of organisations shifted to releasing high-quality software products from just software products, writes Saurabh Chandra in Automation Testing ( >www.tatamcgrawhill.com ). This shift helped in conceptualising a dedicated wing for ‘quality assurance,' which finally got due credit as an important branch of the software development life cycle (SDLC), he adds.
The move from manual methods
The book traces how, as this branch of engineering matured, quality assurance was divided into two main areas, viz. quality auditing and testing. For starters, quality auditors usually check whether all the required standards and procedures laid down since the inception of the SDLC are being adhered to. And manual testing was mainly conducted to test the product for its functionality, release mechanism, performance and user-acceptability.
One also learns that due to tough market competition during the late 1980s and the early 1990s, testing was given a new dimension and a specialised branch of testing known as ‘automation testing and engineering' was born. Since this was a highly specialised field of testing, it was tough to get people in the early stages, the author reminisces.
“But with time, as this field gained popularity, professionals with the right mix of technical and domain knowledge started grooming themselves for it. After overcoming these challenges, the industry became ‘technically' sound in testing applications, releasing profitable quality products within a highly competitive timeframe.”
Second-largest HR consumer
An informative foreword by Robin Sahai opens by acknowledging that testing, despite its importance within the engineering culture, is often overlooked in companies. He highlights that testing usually ranks as the second-largest consumer of human resources within most software projects, and that in some forward-thinking organisations, the ratio of developers to QA is as high as 1:1.
While this indicates a realisation and commitment by most companies to focus on quality, the education and discipline devoted to learning the mechanics of producing quality software are seldom instilled within these testing organisations, rues Sahai. Reminding that, today, time-to-market is an important consideration for most organisations, with delivery dates often decided much before requirements, he notes that, in this frenetic pace, a disciplined, highly-automated testing organisation can be invaluable.
In Sahai's view, automation helps an organisation achieve multiple objectives, thus: “First, by running a disciplined automated test execution programme, organisations can validate their code faster – faster QA leads to faster development. Second, a good automation programme within an organisation helps in job satisfaction and retention as it enables engineers to be engineers. And, third, despite attrition, domain expertise is not lost since the automated tests continue to exist and execute.”
Good beginner material for the entry-level professionals in the field.
Towards collaborative supply chains
In times where customers' tastes change frequently, supply chain success may best be achieved through win-win cultures, observe Eli Schragenheim, H. William Dettmer, and J. Wayne Patterson, the authors of Supply Chain Management at Warp Speed: Integrating the system from end to end ( >www.kkbooks.com ).
New business practices
The authors recommend, for the purpose, that appropriate performance measurements should be in place to ensure trust in collaboration and mutual gains. Also, “the suppliers, producers, distributors, and the sellers should be evaluated based on their contribution to the chain's success in delivering the final product to the customer.”
The book calls for appropriate business practices to implement such a logistical scheme, with rules of partnership leading to the idea of dividing the throughput generated by every sale to a customer to every participant in the sale. For instance, to tie the chain members together tightly, the authors suggest that payment to all links be made only after the end item is sold, and that the supply chain take on another partner to manage the financial transactions.
The two objectives that drive what may seem a radical proposal as above are ‘very fast replenishment times throughout the chain' and ‘relatively low levels of stock at each link in the chain to allow for fast introduction of new products.'
Links in the chain
To those in the SCM (supply chain management) space who wonder where to start, the guidance offered by the book is to focus on the distribution links, which are collectively the largest and the most powerful portion of the supply chain. Implementing the book's concepts in distribution companies would impose pressure on suppliers to ‘do the right thing' by providing vendor-managed inventory using make-to-availability procedures, the authors reason.
They underline that it is important for the distribution links of the chain to reduce slow-moving inventory and to improve the availability of fast movers, because doing so improves the profitability of the whole chain. For, the replenishment of sales signals the remainder of the chain about the customer's taste.
The authors remind that while a distributor with a superior response to customers is an asset in any supply chain, gaining competitive edge can become difficult without the active collaboration of the suppliers. “The fact that the chain is a series of links makes the results at one link dependent on its feeding link, and so on throughout the chain. A shortage anywhere in the chain may have far-reaching effects.”
Swim together
An instructive section in the book is the one titled ‘supply chain members sink or swim together.' It cautions that even if a distributor astutely uses Theory of Constraints (TOC) buffer techniques to ensure reliable availability, an unreliable, slow producer typically negates a major benefit of TOC by forcing downstream links to maintain unnecessarily high stock buffers. “When an entire supply chain holds too much stock, some of it is sure to be in slower-selling items – those that, if only you had known ahead of time, you would have ordered very few (or none) of them. Non-productive stock like this limits investment in stocks of faster-selling items that could be more profitable.”
Looking around at common reactions to supply chain problems, the authors find that members of supply chains commonly believe lack of information to be the issue. Thus, the remedy these members go for is to generate more information, to reach out for new communication technology, and to share information throughout the chain. But is this really the problem, the authors wonder.
Their advice, therefore, is that whenever two companies collaborate, it is necessary to consider the respective individual interests. “A supply chain creates a unique association between various organisations. Their business transactions must truly support a win-win partnership. Only such relationships will lead to the optimum performance of each individual partner in the chain in a way that benefits the whole chain.”
Insightful study for those in the supply chain domain.
Tailpiece
“I studied in a campus that had to pay money to get IT companies come for placement…”
“Oh!”
“And it was only later that I realised our salaries came that way.”
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