Quality Issues In System Development Essay Research

Quality Issues In System Development Essay, Research Paper

Quality Issues In System Development

The period between the 1970’s and 1980’s was a time of great advancement in

computer hardware technology which took an industry still in it’s infancy, to a

level of much sophistication and which ultimately revelutionised the information

storage and processing needs of every other industry and that of the entire

world. However, it was also during this period when the shortcomings of

implementing such technology became apparent. A significant number of

development projects failed which resulted with disastrous consequences, not

only of an economic nature, but social aswell. Seemingly, although hardware

technolgy was readily available and ever improving, what was inhibiting the

industry was in the methods of implementing large systems. Consequently, all

kinds of limited approaches materialized that avoided the costs and risks

inherent in big-systems developments.

Times have changed, and with it our understanding and experience as how

best to develop large systems. Today’s large systems yield greater benefits for

less cost than those of previous decades. Large systems provide better, more

timely information, the ability to integrate and correlate internal and external

information, the ability to integrate and facilitate streamlined business

processes. Unfortunately, not every system that information workers develop are

well implemented; this means that the computer system which was originally

intended to make a company more efficient, productive and cost-effective, is in

the end doing the exact opposite – namely, wasting time, money and valuable

manpower. So even with all the lessons learned from the 70’s and 80’s, our

vastly superior methodologies and knowledge of the 90’s is still proving to be

fallible, as suggested in the following examples.

System Development Failures

In Britain, 1993, an incident occurred which forced the London

Ambulance Service to abandon its emergency system after it performed

disastrously on delivery, causing delays in answering calls. An independent

inquiry ordered by British government agencies found that the ambulance service

had accepted a suspiciously low bid from a small and inexperienced supplier. The

inquiry report, released in February 1993, determined that the system was far

too small to cope with the data load. For an emergency service, the system error

would not only cause the loss of money, but more essentially, fail to dispatch

ambulances correctly and promptly upon the arising of critical situations. Thus,

the implications of such a failure are apparently obvious, both socially and

economically. Since the failures, the ambulance service has reverted to a paper-

based system that will remain in place for the foreseeable future.

Another failure was the collapse of the Taurus trading system of the

London Stock Exchange. Taurus would have replaced the shuffling of six sorts of

paper among three places over two weeks – which is how transactions in shares

are settled in London-with a computerized system able to settle trades in three

days. The five-year Taurus development effort, which sources estimated cost

hundreds of millions of dollars, was termed a disaster, and the project was

abandoned in March 1993. Exchange officials have acknowledged that the failure

put the future of the Exchange in danger.

Why did they fail.

What went wrong with these systems. The real failure in the case of the

London Stock Exchange was managerial, both at the exchange and among member

firms. The exchange’s bosses gave the project managers too much rope, allowing

them to fiddle with specifications and bring in too many outside consultants and

computer firms. Its new board, having heavy-weight and diverse membership,

proved too remote from the project. Member firms that spent years griping about

Taurus’s cost and delays did not communicate their doubts concerning the project.

The Bank of England, a strong Taurus supporter, failed to ask enough questions,

despite having had to rescue the exchange’s earlier attempt to computerize

settlement of the gilts market. According to Meredith , an expert in project

management issues, many system development catastrophes begin with the selection

of a low bidder to do a project, even though most procurement rules state that

cost should be only one of several criteria of designation. The software failure

occurs because the companies involved did not do a risk assessment prior to

starting a project. In addition, many companies do not study the problems

experienced in earlier software development projects, so they cannot apply that

data when implementing new projects.

Another source of problems is the failure to measure the quality of

output during the development process. Information workers as yet have not f

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