DailyPost 1812
I-TAX SOFTWARE – TECHNOLOGY SANS DOMAIN
The biggest casualty of the Indian software industry has been the software itself. The audit of the Indian software companies will throw open what software they have made so far and with what success rate, if any? Has it been developed without any hue and cry and also crisis and finally it was made to happen somehow, when the customer and development company got into full distress mode. In how many of the software development projects, the Indian giants have been able to pull off the software without any expert? Do they feel that software engineers have the capability to pull off requirement gathering, translate it into a software requirement specification and then take it through the software development process to UAT and commissioning?
If the software goes through the Software Development Life Cycle in a stringent manner, you will never have to wait for the post commissioning fiasco. The software would have been tested at different points in its development process, at the time of UAT, third party audit et al. The software would also go through functional, integration, load, penetration and performance testing. How can the Income Tax software imbroglio happen is a million dollar question? Before getting into the domain issue, it is pertinent to find out whether all other parameters were running fine but for some domain related hiccups. Infosys was to develop the next generation income tax filing system to reduce processing time for returns from 63 days to one day and expedite refunds.
Was the software developed on these lines all throughout, supervised and authenticated by the top brass and finally it started giving humungous problems on commissioning? Did they come to know that they don’t have domain capabilities when the system started to get awry? That the Indian IT industry represented by behemoths have never invested in any domain expertise either among their software engineers or brought domain experts, who can be used as an interface between the requirements and the software developers. In the race for getting orders after orders, where is the time specialize. The added misery is that the worst of their engineers are put on Indian projects and in that too govt. While the world is full of specialized software in an endless number of areas, being created by companies, who have developed a niche after decades of relentless R&D, barely Indian.
If we are still battling with the tech / technologist and the domain / CA debate, it is a different world to reach software development at par with the world. The National e-Governance Mission Mode projects had a difficult time for similar reasons. The Police IT project in Karnataka went into a decade being developed by one of Indian IT behemoths and they repeated the same story, with the CCTNS Project of the Govt. of India. The GST and MCA story is better known. Are these projects treated as projects of transformational change for the country and placed differently, or does it have to compete with sundry private projects in Europe or US, paying more, for getting the right engineers? Do we have software development capabilities is the question we have down to? From requirement gathering to commissioning you have to fail at every level to deliver a failed software? Domain experts are missing in the software development landscape of India, but in the instant case can just be an alibi.
SOFTWARE IS NOT JUST A BUSINESS, IT ACTS AS THE LUBRICANT TO THE ECONOMIC ENGINE OF THE NATION.
Sanjay Sahay