The media over the past week has been plagued with reports pertaining to South African banking after core banking services went offline due to system related changes. The subject has also been one that has been the highlight of many discussions within the South African ICT industry particularly in terms of the causality of such failures and the effectiveness of the implementation of underlying processes within I.T organizations that are geared towards mitigating such risks. It is evident that businesses as well as consumers are heavily reliant on technology and breakdown in service delivery as experienced with core banking solutions, telecommunications and government platforms such as eNaTIS carry unacceptable impact to both the software user base as well as the manufacturer of the software – a “Digital Meltdown”. 

So what are the solutions and more importantly, how do large I.T organizations prevent a “Digital Meltdown”? To understand the solution and mitigating actions it is necessary to explore the various dimensions of software development and fully understand all of the potential risks that come into play. Historically and what I often refer to as the “medieval times” of I.T, organizations were focused on building capability to deploy new technologies quickly into the market. Essentially organizations maintained competitive edge and market share by focusing on optimizing the mark to market timeline. This approach is very common in the industry and has worked well for many organizations in the past. However with a new dawn where customers and businesses are more reliant on technology it is fast becoming an outdated approach that is the single cause of poorly developed software, failing I.T projects and unsatisfied key stakeholders. The modern day risks of poorly developed systems impact both the software user base and the manufacturer. The major risks and often the most common are monetary loss, reputational risk and the cost of rework. Failures and defects could potentially create monetary loss where business and financial income comes to a grinding halt. In most cases this is often an opportunity cost rather than an actual cost. The reputational risk that arises from defective software and failures are never welcomed by large I.T organizations and to a large extent impacts market share, competitive edge and ultimately profit margins. The cost of rework is another risk that is borne by I.T organizations whereby skilled resources are required to fix defects. Industry studies have revealed that it can cost up to 70% more to fix a defect that is identified in a production environment as compared to a defect detected during the development process. With all of these key factors in mind a new business driver from an I.T perspective is born – Software Quality Assurance.

• Software Quality Assurance maturity must be benchmarked across the organization and the necessary optimizations must be applied to make the transition to a Software Quality Orientated Organization.
• Quality Governance criteria must be established and well integrated into the overall Project Governance strategy. Quality must be built-in at all stages of the development lifecycle.
• Software must be thoroughly tested prior to implementation into a production environment. The test effort must be disciplined, must validate system functionality and the ability of both software and underlying hardware to scale to expected volumes.

• Reduction of development implementation costs
• Creation of software quality orientated organizations
• Improved SQA Maturity Rating as per the SQA Maturity Model™

• SQA Healthcheck using the STS SQA Maturity Model™
• QA Process Engineering
• QA Management Consulting
• Evaluation and training of QA Professionals
• Unit Testing
• Functional Testing
• System Integration Testing
• Performance Engineering
• Automated Regression Testing