Interview: Mr. Shinnichi Morigawa, Nikkei Computer talks to Mr. T Ashok, CEO of STAG about Indian test market and service to offer.

"A guarantee of quality by the process is inadequate: The CEO of the Indian company specializing in software testing"

Source: Online Nikkei Computer, 10th Aug, 2006
(Use Google/Yahoo URL translator to read the article in english)

STAG Software, an Indian company specializing in software test engineering, plans to offer its specialized test service offerings in Japan through its alliance with Japanese partner IV Square Corporation from September 2006. In India, there are over 20 independent software-testing firms and STAG is listed among the top 10.

As you know, many IT majors such as GE, Philip, or Cisco Systems big businesses own a software development foothold in India.? The demand for quality has increased over the years. Initially the companies outsourced testing to few vendors in low scale; soon they realized that quality is competitive business strategy. With demand rising exponentially, vendors noticed the huge business potential hence more vendors joined in to offer test services.

STAG has three broad portfolios of services. We offer wide spectrum of software test services, test consulting to institutionalize good test practices in development process, and training in software testing. Our services are backed by formal body of test knowledge distilled from science and technology of testing into STEM™. Our method prevents and detects defects and help deliver clean software. What is important is that "it guarantees the quality to a product". Many organizations have adopted CMM, TMM as quality initiatives, but whether these are contributing to quality of the product is unclear.

It is not possible to determine number of bugs. However, if a bug is detected, it can be proved that quality has increased. A leading Japanese vendor approached us to undertake a test assignment and we detected about 20 bugs after performing system test translating to savings of 100,000,000 yen.

We would like to start from training service and focus a bit on SI vendors. Essentially, a user company should be the owner of quality. The needs from a user company are expected. However, it is not clear who is accountable for quality, the vendor or the user organization and how much does it cost to assure quality if vendor does it. In order to judge a worth of service to guarantee quality, there should be open information sharing on how the tests were performed and the number of the bugs detected to improve quality. I wish such an "open quality movement" spread out in future.