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Software Quality In a Non-Software Company?
Nicros writes "I work for a publicly traded biotech company that happens to write software that is, in fact, kind of critical for the business — without it no data would ever be read from our instruments, and no analyses would be performed on that data. The problem is that as a 'biotech' company, we are not taking software quality seriously. We have no senior management with any history of commercial software development — our C level has really no clue whatsoever what software really is, much less what is going on in software development. All of our quality processes are related to manufacturing our system (not software), so we are constantly forced into ad-hoc development since there is no real process for our development. Repeated requests to hire someone with some real commercial software development experience have gone unanswered. I have been to the CEO directly one-on-one and although he agreed this was an issue, thanked me, and said he would look into it, that was the end of it. He has bigger things to worry about. So the question: Is this just a fact of life and I need to deal the best I can? What else can I do to get some attention on software quality in the company?"
Prepare a brief for the management-level at your company. Show them basic tools for managing software quality. Dig up documents that show different ways of improving software quality. Talk about development methods (agile, etc).
Tools like Redmine are very pretty and manager-friendly (and free). Show them how easy it is to add tickets, approve and deny work, track changes to the software as it evolves and isolate changes until they are tested properly.
Point out that there is a potential legal minefield if they get something wrong and it's proved to be the software at fault. Show them that tracking each and every change along with who authorised it, who did the work, who approved the changed software to run, etc will help lift some of that liability.
Managers aren't all clueless, and all ones that I know are genuinely willing to do things better. Often they are too caught up in doing things to appease the board that they don't have time to look at things that seem menial to them.
If you don't prepare a brief and suggest a really good solution or two they'll eventuall get a contractor in who will charge a fortune, tell them that everything sucks and then leave. Then you'll be stuck with a half-arsed process based on some pie in the sky ideas from a contractor who really can't know the day to day ins and outs of what you do.
At the end of the day what you need to demonstrate is that by putting a process in place and then tools/staff to support it you'll be able to achieve better results.
I drink to make other people interesting!
I also work for a biotech but we're lucky enough to have a CEO who's a computer scientist so he knew the importance of IT. As such we have a rather larger IT dept which includes a software development team.
In order to show the bossesses that proper software maintenance/creation/validation procedures are important just explain what would the FDA or some other regulatory agency do to your collective bung holes if they were to probe deeper into your practices.
Mission critical data being handled by non-validated/non-documented software is just like having untrained people working with samples in the lab, it's a big no-no.
You need paperwork that supports your claim, start with all the areas where un-validated software is used, then add to that a second section explaining the cost of poorly planned development iterations. We work using monthly iterations and when we told the people responsible for the software in the field that an iteration cost about 30 000$ just in labor costs they started paying attention and making the lists of demands count, i.e. removing the superflueous demands (ex: "it would look nicer in blue" was replaced with "The standard deviation calculation should be done with X+1, not just X.")
~Syberz