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Juhani
Anttila
PRODUCT QUALITY IN SOFTWARE BUSINESS
CONNECTION Abstract Product and its quality are clarified in this paper at first conceptually. After a clear general understanding of product-concept and a product's inherent characteristics, satisfaction of users (customers) and the other interested parties is considered. This general insight is applied to the software industry's business needs where the products are strongly service and information or knowledge content. Within software industry there are many quite different business areas. Practical experiences presented in this paper where the general described principles have been applied are from an e-business software engineering application for a B2B case. Product concept for the software industry As a whole the software industry does not fundamentally differ from any other business branch. Any company as well as a software company has its own business mission, vision, and correspondingly own approach for management and leadership. Business is run as projects or processes in order to produce outputs to the needs and expectations of markets or individual customers. Software industry is strongly based on projects. However, when plenty of projects are being simultaneously and continuously carried out, the business can be effectively and efficiently done only through processes, project-processes. Within software industry there are many quite different types of businesses, where typical buyer-supplier relationships are characteristically different. Examples include software products, such as commercial-off-the-shelf software applications, system products or components for them, and software realization services, such as software engineering services, platform tailoring and other modification services, and embedded software businesses, and pure application services, such as ASP. These businesses may be either B2C or B2B cases. Emphasis of the practical example of this paper is on the software system engineering for B2B cases. Very often software industry is not very familiar with generally recognized quality methodology but they have developed and lived with their own dedicated procedures and methods. Neither in the development of general quality methodologies the needs of the software industry have been strongly under consideration. This may cause problems when integrating software elements into larger system products. In fact, in practice software is always a part of some bigger entity, and nowadays almost all products may include software modules. The product issues of software companies have been considered typically in practice and in research studies in an inadequate way. Therefore it is better to go back to the basics. According to the standard vocabulary and definition of the recognized ISO 9000:2000 standard a product as a concept is in general "a result of a process" to be delivered from the supplier to the customer (see figure 1). This definition of a product is valid for all kinds of businesses. Services are nowadays the most important products or parts of the products of any company including software industry. In addition to services, those companies may produce also goods. A service may consist of human and mechanic (automatic) service elements. Thus, also a software company is factually and primarily a service company. Understanding the concept of service has proved to be difficult in practice. According to the standard definition of ISO 9000 for service-concept, 'service' refers to the result of a company's actions (processes) to the customer, who also participates in this result through his or her own actions. The action itself does not constitute a service, but a service is rather a more permanent result (e.g. the memorable experience produced by a travel agency) which the customer retains even after the activity ends.
Software industry is very strongly a knowledge-based business. Knowledge is the major element in all products (both in goods and services) and in the business processes of a software company. Therefore this context requires a clear understanding of knowledge in general and in particular related to the product concept. In general the concept of knowledge may be understood in many different ways. It has been considered deeply e.g. by many recognized philosophers during centuries. The pragmatic knowledge-concept is suitable for business purposes. It implies that knowledge means a belief on the nature of some item relevant to a business context. As a consequence of genuine knowledge one can act in a new meaningful way. Knowledge is a real thing only if it is tested by an action and thus changed into a useful activity. In that way also the importance of knowledge is emphasized as a major feature of a product. Thus, knowledge can never be objective. Knowledge can never exist as such but it has always some kind of
"carrier". Examples of the different types of knowledge
and its knowledge-carrier include: It is not meaningful to talk about a particular knowledge or information
product. Knowledge and information exist always embedded with their
carriers, and in fact, all products (goods and services) always consist
of some kind of information. As examples one may mention a disc with
information or software program, IT system with business information,
quality records on intranet pages, conference paper, consulting service
of an expert, skills of a professional at work, etc. Products of the
software industry benefit software and electronic digital technologies
for knowledge and information business. Thus, as the carrier always
has a crucial role and effect in the provision of knowledge and information,
the knowledge-product can always be restored to the consideration
of traditional goods and services or their combinations. Knowledge
and information are inherent characteristics of any product. There should be a clear understanding of the fundamental difference between two concepts, "quality" and "grade". Before starting any product development project and before establishing product requirements one must have a clear decision on the grade of the product performance. Grade implies the chosen category or rank of performance relevant to the needs of the focused market segment (cf. ISO 9000:2000). The application case: eQuality portal of the "Killer grade" For getting practical experiences, the general principles presented above in this paper have been applied in an e-business application for a B2B case. The e-Quality Portal is a cutting-edge gateway to quality-related business reality for enhancing quality awareness, improved use of expertise, performance management and interested party confidence. It was initiated as joint venture of Sonera Corporation seeing the importance to provide a generic solution for the units of its business community and Finnevo Ltd being interested to satisfy the similar needs in the market. To the portal owner organization the e-Quality Postal is a software engineering product and to the end users (members of the portal organization and its interested parties) the Portal provides automatic quality management and quality assurance services. Targeted grade of performance of the e-Quality Portal was to create
a killer application to enable to bring about a disruptive and regenerating
improvement compared with the following sustaining quality management
and quality assurance practices: The biggest challenge for the e-quality Postal is the poor use of business related knowledge and information that may appear in many forms (see figure 4). Knowledge may be missing in general, or just internally. It may be unused because the needed tacit or relevant explicit knowledge is not available or accessible at the moment of truth or is not in a useful form. It may be used but not appropriately or at opportune time and place, or it may be misused. As we see, a greater challenge than to stretch the usefulness of explicit knowledge, information and data to its extreme is to bring about a radical improvement of utilization of tacit knowledge and information. This is a strong strive for eliminating "tacit ignorance" (Ref. H. Haapio).
Fig. 4. Challenge of the e-Quality Portal to enhance the effectiveness
and efficiency of the use of knowledge and information Product quality refers to how well product features correspond to the requirements. This must create value to customer and generate customer satisfaction. The innovation called for a successful killer solution satisfies even latent needs and poorly articulated requirements. Quality of innovation is determined before product development by the creative use of profound knowledge of the poorly preventable problems brought on by conventional practices. During product development this calls for eliminating risks of eventually inappropriate assumptions by effective investigations of potential customer requirements and simulative validation of preliminary solutions. These activities can be concurrent with determination of such product features, which are needed for rapid acceptance and realization of breakthrough impacts. The concept of e-Quality Portal and its potential features and related
relevant factors based on profound knowledge of substance area were
generated. After that prof. Kano´s approach was used to draw
conclusions of the prioritized elements to be included in the requirement
specification. Conclusions were drawn about the potential features
regarding to their prioritized Relevant indexes were calculated for these based on the Kano-survey
results of found factor category hits. The factor categories are:
M = "must be" factor, S = "satisfier", D = "delighter",
I = indifference factor, R = reverse factor, and C = contradictory
factor. First each potentially relevant characteristics, feature and
attribute of the e-Quality Portal was presented to the interviewees
by stating both a) that the feature is functional and b) that it is
dysfuntional. Interviewees showed their attitudes towards these application
performance statements by responding with one of the alternative expressions: For instance one of the potential features was that "e-Quality Portal enables use of location-based information". Based on the survey 40 % of hits was in favor of this factor being classified as S (satisfier), 20 %-portions were in favor of D (delighter), I (indifferent) and that the dysfunctional feature is a must-be factor. The calculated index was based 75 % for generation potential of the customer satisfaction, 50 % potential for customer dissatisfaction and 25 % for remaining customer indifferent. This resulted to leave this feature with rather low priority (the 4th of 6 priority classes). However, the need to provide location-based services, enabling applications to take a device´s location into account was stated as one of the technical requirements. (This decision reflected the interest to leave this feature to be a part of marketing mix regarding to the willingness-to-pay of targeted segments.) So called Control Module was specified as a part of the Content-Related Static Portal Logic. That is for the automatic reasoning for operations and is needed to ensure that a user is supported and alerted appropriately in operations according to the use cases (eventually depending on authorization and personalization for as well as location of the user). A software interface requirement was as an example that the e-Quality Portal can be in interaction with Corporation's Positioning Service to define the location of a mobile user. Product characteristics and the brand characterization The general systematic hierarchy of the product characteristics described
above was used in the requirement specification of the e-Quality Portal.
The most essential specified characteristics of the e-Quality Portal
product include the following items: In addition to these characteristics also several important multidimensional performance characteristics were specified including security (accuracy, availability, confidentiality, authenticity, and authority), and portability. Brand outcome of the e-Quality Portal was based on the requirement survey. In generating customer satisfaction one must excel customer expectations appropriately. The base of expectations is the brand of the product. As a result of the survey was the conclusion of the brand value statement of e-Quality Portal: "factual quality anywhere anytime" based on the brand authority: "a cutting-edge gateway connecting us to everything and everybody we need to excel in quality-related business reality ". As the rational part of its brand personality it was emphasized: "assuring, knowledgeable, helpful, 'killer application'" and as the emotional part "clear, trustable, smart, disruptive way to improvement". The benefits are: "more gain with less pain" as gain increase: new type of value-added experience and breakthrough options and as pain decrease: ease, cost reductions. The brand service is: "support, facilitation, sharing, learning, collaboration, improvement". Conclusions Experiences behind this paper prove that generally recognized quality management and quality assurance principles and methodology may be very useful also in software-related businesses and for considering quality of their products in a professional way. This is also beneficial when integrating software modules in large system products. Naturally in the context of software technology also specialized quality methodology is needed. Key issue is the consistency with the different methods used. Product issues are very essential topics when considering quality of software business connections. Products should be understood and handled in a broad sense including both goods, and human and automatic services. Software businesses are primarily service organizations. e-Quality Portal is a challenging product to demonstrate the practical use of recognized quality methodology in the business areas of software system design and engineering, and specialized automatic service for e-business. References This paper was published in: Other references 1. Hannula M, Järvelin A-M., Seppä M. (Editors): AeBR 2001,
Frontiers of e-Business Research 2001, Proceedings: Anttila J., Vakkuri
J.: Business integrated e-quality, Tampere University of Technology
and University of Tampere, Tampere 2002 Acknowledgements The sustained cooperation with Mr. Jorma Vakkuri, Finnevo Ltd., has significantly influenced many views and details of this paper. Many fruitful discussions and debates with him are very much acknowledged and appreciated. [This text was presented as a conference paper at the Software Quality ECSQ conference in Helsinki, Finland 2002]
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