Lessons from India Inc.

by Gary H. Anthes
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April 2, 2001, 02:39 PM —  Computerworld — 

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.

Quality at Any Cost?

There are several well-defined road maps to better software quality, such as the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) for software. But it's expensive to substantially improve existing software development processes, and sometimes U.S. managers believe the required investment just isn't worth it.

"Pragmatic executives are often reluctant to put up an investment that will take a year or two to pull off, and sometimes three or four years," says software quality expert Watts Humphrey.

Some U.S. companies have found it easier to make that investment in India rather than in the U.S., at least initially. Motorola set up a development center in India in 1993 when it found it hard to substantially improve its U.S. software practices, says Michael Cusumano, who was a consultant to Motorola at the time.

"The CMM demands lots of documentation and traceability procedures, very intensive quality assurance procedures and process support people, so there's a lot of resistance from managers," he says. "But setting up a facility from scratch and introducing the right practices from the very beginning is a good way to get a software development organization to

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