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In the area of software development, timing is a crucial factor. If the end products cannot be delivered in time, the clients will be lost. Our observation has revealed that some software firms failed to meet the deadline decided in concurrence with the clients for delivering end products and subsequently the clients cancelled their work orders. Failure to meet the deadline for any software project may cause negative attitude towards our software marketing efforts among the prospective clients. So, estimating deadline for any software project must be realistic and software firms must pay especial attention to this.
For marketing, pricing of the product is an important issue. For developers one of the biggest questions is "how much should we charge for our software?" Asking too little price will be unsafe because in that case developers even cannot reach the break event point. Again, charging too much for the product will be a barrier to our marketing efforts. Though the software pricing is a complex phenomenon, there are still some scientific-economic theories in this regard. These theories must be applied when the software companies fix the prices of their product. In this context, it must be mentioned that as we are at the entry point of global software market, our profit margin should be minimal so that we can easily compete with other software exporting countries. In fact, at this moment our objective should be to create our profile in the international market by producing quality software at a relatively low price.
From the client's point of view, the quality assurance is of prime concern as most of the systems are to be used in real time environment. Yet now, our software companies in general have not gained confidence in developing quality software. Right now we have over 200 software developing firms and among them only 20 companies have earned ISO 9001 certification but not a single one has achieved CMM/CMM1 level 3 certification. In this context it should be stated that achieving ISO 9001 certification is not that important an issue to justify the quality of software products. ISO only focuses the general aspects of development to certify the quality. But achieving CMM/CMM1 (minimum at level 3 out of five levels) is the prime factor for defining quality software. One statistics has revealed that some of the software companies in our country could only pass the first level of CMM/CMM1. In this respect, it must be stated that if a software product could pass at least the level three of CMM/CMM1, then we can classify this as a quality product. The barriers to achieving quality software on the part of our software industries are discussed below:
To ensure the quality of software products, the developing firms must go through some defined software development steps as suggested in software engineering discipline. The very first step is to analyse the users' requirement. Defining users' requirement precisely is a crucial part as designing of the system vastly depends on this. Ideally, system analysts should do all sorts of analysis to produce user requirement analysis documents. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, a few firms pay much effort to produce flawless user requirement documents. This is, in fact, due to lack of theoretical knowledge in system analysis and design. Production of high quality requirement analysis documents needs in-depth theoretical knowledge in system analysis and design. But many of the local software development firms lack the expertise in this field. To combat this limitations, software firms should consult academics in this field with a view to producing relatively flawless user requirement analysis documents.
Apart from user requirement analysis, the designing part of the software product is the most vital part in the development process. The efficiency of any implemented software system entirely depends on its design. Again, availability of expert software designers is a real challenge to our software industries. In fact, as we have entered the software development area quite recently compared with other countries, a few software engineers could acquire required expertise in software designing. In this context, it may be pointed out that we have many entry-level programmers or coders but the number of experienced and expert software engineers is still a handful in number. In fact, our software industries are suffering from the lack of availability of resourceful persons who can guide large and complex software projects properly to produce quality end products. It may be mentioned here that sound academic knowledge in software engineering is a must for developing a quality software system. A bridge between industries and academic institutions can improve this scenario. Sound knowledge of the academics on the theoretical aspect of software design may be exploited in industrial software projects. Besides, depending on the complexity of the project, software firms may hire foreign experts for specific periods to accomplish the project properly.
Software development process must follow some specific model, depending on characteristics of a system to be developed, available resource persons and other technical factors. Our empirical studies have shown that many of our software development firms do not follow any particular model in developing their software products. Without adopting any suitable model for development the end product cannot be a quality one. So, prior to starting a software project, the developer must select his own model for development.
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The writers are the faculty members in CS of American International University-Bangladesh (AIUB)
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