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{{B}}Will Quality Eat up the US Lead in Software?{{/B}} If US software companies don't pay more attention to quality, they could kiss their business good-bye. Both India and Brazil are developing a world-class software industry. Their weapon is quality and one of their jobs is to attract the top US quality specialists whose voices are not listened to in their country. AIready, of the world's 12 software houses that have earned the highest rating in the world, seven are in India. That's largely because they have used new methodologies rejected by American software specialists. For example, for decades, quality specialists, W. Edwards Deming and J. M. Juran had urged US software companies to change their attitudes to quality. But their quality call mainly fell on deaf ears in the US — but not in Japan. By the 1970s and 1980s, Japan was grabbing market share with better, cheaper products. They used Deming's and Juran's ideas to bring down the cost of good quality to as little as 5% of total production costs. In US factories, the cost of quality then was 10 times as high: 50%. In software, it still is. Watts S. Humphrey spent 27 years at IBM heading up software production and then quality assurance. But his advice was seldom paid attention to. He retired from IBM in 1986. In 1987, he worked out a system for assessing and improving software quality. It has proved its value time and again. For example, in 1990 the cost of quality at Raytheon Electronics Systems was almost 60% of total software production costs. It tell to 15% in 1996 and has since further dropped to below 10%. Like Deming and Juran, Humphrey seems to be winning more praises overseas than at home. The Indian government and several companies have just founded the Watts Humphrey Software Quality Institute at the Software Technology Park in Chennai, India. Let's hope that US lead in software will not be eaten up by its quality problems. |