April 02, 2001, 3:39 PM — Once a sleepy pensioners' paradise, this city today is choked with traffic. Much of the greenery that gave Bangalore the nickname "Garden City" has been hacked away to make room for office towers, and people on the street cover their mouths and noses against the pollution. Telephones, water and electricity remain unreliable, and the roads and airports are decrepit, by Western standards.
But against the chaos of much of downtown Bangalore stands a shining symbol of India's aspiration to become a software superpower. The headquarters of Infosys Technologies Ltd., set on a 29-acre campus on the city's outskirts, is a group of gleaming multistory buildings containing development and test centers, classrooms, dormitories, an auditorium with a 40-screen video wall, sports facilities and two huge food courts that serve traditional southern Indian food and hot Domino's pizzas that are delivered to employees' desktops.
Founded in 1981 by six engineers armed with just $250 in loans from their wives, 8,900-employee Infosys in the first three quarters of last year earned a handsome $93 million on revenue of $293 million. The company [Nasdaq: INFY], today has a market capitalization of about $10 billion -- more than that of Computer Sciences Corp. and Sapient Corp. combined.
Infosys attributes much of its success to rigorous quality control. Indeed, software developers in India have made quality something of an obsession. Most developers here pursue and win the International Standards Organization (ISO) 9000 certification for excellence and then go on to climb the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) ladder. CMM is a product of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), run by Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. It describes the practices that make for effective software development, and it lays out a five-level progression from ad hoc, chaotic processes to mature, disciplined approaches.
Of the 42 organizations worldwide that have reached Level 5 on the CMM scale, 25 are based in India, according to the SEI.
Relatively few software shops in the U.S. seem prepared to invest the considerable time and effort needed to reach those lofty levels, but there's much they could learn from Indian developers, such as how to improve software quality by measuring and analyzing defects, rework costs and estimation accuracy. And software quality experts say the payoff isn't just in less-buggy software but in big productivity gains as well.
