Improving validation activities in a global software development

Abstract:

        Compared to the traditional software development global software development posses a large risk and error prone development. That is due to lack of proper communication, interaction, cultural effects, and lots more. This obviously impacts a great amount of organizations resources. To overcome with that problem, and issues its important to take early measure by introducing proper validation in the system. In this paper validation activities in a global setting within Alcatel's Switching and Routing business was studied. The author of the paper proposed 3 hypotheses for cost reduction by earlier defect detection and less defects introduced. The propositions were 1. Collocating peer reviews 2. Effective process coaching 3. Introduction of Teamwork and Continuous build. The challenges addressed with these hypothesis were to support validation in a global product line concept, to facilitate early defect detection with an improved validation process, and to reduce overall cost of non-quality (cost of rework) 

Discussions:

        As per the study made in the paper, introducing some changes towards improving the sense of responsibility for end results, it is possible to keep quality and productivity standards and to improve performance even with this changing work environment. With the attention on collocating peer reviews, embarking on better process coaching, and introducing incremental build principle into the projects, it is possible to improve cost of non-quality by a factor of over 50% . Although the direct impact is visible on defects and quality level, it is possible to achieve both cost and cycle time improvements. This is obvious if teams are encouraged to focus on the right quality level as long as they are in full control of the results, and not to wait until the next project phase.

          Summarize the overall practices related to improve validation activities, which were identified over the past years that clearly support global software development:

•  Communicate at project start the respective project targets to reduce the cost of non quality
• Make teams responsible for there results (expose them to the project environment and set up, rather than simply doing some module)
• Define at the beginning which teams are involved in what activity at which location 
• Setting up a project homepage for each project that summarizes project content, progress metrics, planning in-formation, and team-specific information 
• Collocates as much as possible 
• Provide necessary coaching 
• Provide necessary tools and technologies 

            Collocating peer reviews improves both efficiency and effectiveness of defect detection and thus reduce cost of non-quality. Providing a certain level of coaching within the project reduces cost of non-quality. Re engineering the development process towards team-work and continuous build allows to better managing glob-ally distributed projects, and thus reduces cost of non-quality.