Quality... We know what it is, without knowing what it is. This is a contradiction. Some things are better than other, in other words, they have major Quality. But, trying to define what is quality, making abstraction of objects that possess it, it is impossible to find the words to describe it. More...

Total Quality Management is a structured system for satisfying internal and external customers and suppliers by integrating the business environment, continuous improvement, and breakthroughs with development, improvement, and maintenance cycles while changing organizational culture.
One of the keys to implementing TQM can be found in this definition. More...

ISO 9000: The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is the specialized international agency for standardization, at present comprising the national standards bodies of 91 countries. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) is the member body representing the United States. ISO is made up of approximately 180 Technical Committees. Each Technical Committee is responsible for one of many areas of specialization ranging from asbestos to zinc. The purpose of ISO is to promote the development of standardization and related world activities to facilitate the international exchange of goods and services, and to develop cooperation in intellectual, scientific, technological, and economic activity. More...

Developing reliable and usable software that is delivered on time and within budget is a difficult endeavor for many organizations. Products that are late, over budget, or that dont work as expected also cause problems for the organization's customers. As software projects continue to increase in size and importance, these problems become magnified. These problems can be overcome through a focused and sustained effort at building a process infrastructure of effective software engineering and management practices. More...

Some people ask if these programs are equivalent or better than the IS0 9000 series. The answer to this question is simple: you can't hope to meet the expectations of any of these programs if you aren't already implementing the ISO 9000 (ANSI/ISO/ASQ Q9000) standards in your company. These standards provide the foundation on which you can build your quality management and quality assurance systems so you may ultimately achieve a high level of success. Moreover, the ISO 9000 series is the only system accepted internationally. More...

Despite years of coaxing, IT organizations are largely reluctant to institute project-management metrics programs. IT departments at small and midsize companies in particular seem disinclined to institute policies to track the performance of development projects. With limited management resources available and the pressure to quickly deploy new business solutions, productivity measurement often becomes a low priority for many organizations. More...

This article shows you many ways of estimating software complexity. In order to do that, many metrics have been created for this purpose. Software complexity is one branch of software metrics that is focused on direct measurement of software attributes, as opposed to indirect software measures such as project milestone status and reported system failures. There are hundreds of software complexity measures, ranging from the simple, such as source line of code, to the esoteric, such as the number of variable definition/usage associations. More...

Benchmarking is related to quality. Benchmark means to adopt a parameter in order to make measure. Benchmarking is made of at least three activities:
- Select an item to measure (a performance)
- Select the benchmark
- Make the measure More...

This technique is often used today as outsourcing IT software development and maintenance activities has become increasingly popular as a mean of enabling an organization to more effectively focus on their core business activities. More...

What You Can Measure You Can Manage.
A Key Performance Indicator is a measure of performance, there are many performance mesaures, there are only a few (fewer than 20) key performance indicators.
I n order to know "what am I doing?", many companies use functional measures, but to measure the performance of the chain, it is necessary to use complex control parameters to measure the efficiency and the effectiveness. More...

With apologies to the movie Jerry McGuire, this demand could easily serve as the battle cry in organizations today when it comes to approving new projects or expanding existing ones. The continuing economic doldrums have sharpened the focus of senior executives on return on investment, or ROI. Simply put, they want to know, "If we invest a buck, how many bucks do we get in return, and when?" More...

US companies in the past ten years have spent one trillion dollars on information technology (IT). Yet there has been only marginal improvement in the productivity of more than 60 million American white-collar workers. IT expenditures now exceed 2% of the Gross Domestic Product in the US, but the net economic contribution of IT has yet to be realized. More...

There are a lot of matters involved in the Quality sector. Our conclusion is that it cannot be considered as a technical matter, as it involves more than technical skills. This means that all the processes (business and other) must be developed on a Quality framework. Quality doesn't mean a lot if it is related to one aspect in particular. Administrative processes, IT processes are different and for each there must exist a way of measuring this level of quality. More...

Legacy systems have survived mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, re-engineering efforts, technical revolutions, industry realignment and Y2k. These systems, some dating back to the 1960s, remain the mainstay of information management capabilities, even as companies focus on e-commerce opportunities. More...

Legacy systems are a rich untapped reserve of business rules that can be componentized and reused as part of the development process. Recreating the business rules contained in legacy systems would cost some companies more than their total fair market valuation. More...

In any BPR project, the as-is model should be used as a basis to redesign workflows. As processes are eliminated, updated, added, and re-sequenced, links to legacy system functions are maintained. The modeling approach used can be flexible, because the open transition model supports mapping of legacy functions to object, user interface, or other types of models. Upon completion of the new business model, work can begin on the retooling strategy. This requires an assessment of the existing architecture and target requirements which results in a detailed, retooling implementation plan. More...

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Component-Based Development (CBD)

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