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Thursday, June 03, 2004
Toral: Government and software dev’t
By Janette Toral
Digital Filipino
SLOW COUNT. Witnessing the slowness of the processing of our election returns makes me wonder if things would have been better if the computerized election had pushed through.
Until now, I can’t believe that the whole computerization project was put on hold because of the controversy in the administrative procedures.
If the technical set-up was not the one in question, I hope that was not compromised for the sake of the majority of the voting Filipinos who can benefit from having a computerized election system.
NEW METHODS. More than ever, government software development processes need to be looked at, assessed, and improved. Adopting new methodologies like the Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI) can help guide government in maturing their processes.
If government will adopt these new methodologies, it will greatly influence various agencies as well on how they evaluate and choose the vendors they deal with.
Instead of price being the primary factor, maturity of processes and experience should be given higher points especially in multi-million government projects.
A mature process will have the necessary support infrastructure in place. This includes a library where various project artifacts are properly stored and accessed when necessary for future review and reference. Today, hardly would you find software project artifacts completely intact.
A quality assurance team can also be formed who will ensure that the necessary software development policies, plans, and standards are followed prior to sign-off of each milestone.
With this in place, scandals like what the Comelec and TopWeb went through won’t happen again.
Furthermore, government needs to embrace metrics in its software projects and must measure all IT-related project performance so that the people can be informed on the savings and even losses being incurred in IT projects today, triggering improvement steps.
Software process improvement or SPI is a culture that must be advocated.
This needs to be done so taxpayers’ money will be used efficiently and the benefit be strongly feltby the stakeholders they serve.
Kudos as well to the National Computer Center for its 1st Software Process Improvement Workshop for Government!
(email: janette@digitalfilipino.com.)
(June 3, 2004 issue)
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