The strategic importance of adopting quality standards cannot be discounted. The CMM Integrated model is a well-accepted quality standard in the global software industry. However, CMMI or any other model is not a panacea, but an aid that will help an organization pursuit the quality efforts. Successful adoption of quality initiatives have come from those organizations where there already existed a culture of quality and there had been a commitment from the top management for the same. The article describes various quality models in vogue in the software industry and details Wipro Technologies' successful adoption of CMMI model. As far as the software industry is concerned the first part of the adage may hold true but not the second. The new adage for them would most probably be something like this,
For decades, customers of software services have complained about the so-called "software crisis". Crisis, because most of the software projects are invariably delayed and have crossed their budgets. As a matter of fact, the US Department of Defense in a study found that on an average a 28-month schedule was missed by an average of 20 months and in an another review the US Government Accounting Office found that on an average projects costs were almost double their initial budgetary allocation. The conclusion was that, "The understanding of software as a product and software development as a process is not keeping pace with the growing complexity and software dependence of existing and emerging mission-critical systems."
But rather than this being a problem specifically for the software industry, if one were to observe various industries in general, one would find that there are crises all around and not just specific to this industry alone. Mark C Paulk, a senior member of the technical staff at Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Carnegie Mellon University, who is also the principal architect of SW-CMM, feels that many of these crises are derived from human nature and ability, than from the inherent complexity of software systems, daunting though that complexity may be. The "software crisis" is, therefore, not unique to the software industry, he concludes.
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