Daily Post 1244
SOFTWARE – THE SOFT UNDERBELLY OF INDIA
If you get a chance to share the experience of any senior official who has had the opportunity to create and deploy a mammoth software solution, the bitterness with which he would narrate the harrowing story would be one of its kind. By the the grace of God the software gets created and deployed with die hard effort of the concerned owners, forcing that non-existent magic out of the company. When no software products are made in this country, our fond hope that software’s would be created by the very same companies for our limited purposes would only remain a pipe dream.
The age old advice that one would understand the travails of human existence if you make a house sounds completely hollow if one sets out to make a software. If would be the eighth wonder if any software was created on time. The hunt for it is on. The lethargy the software development duration created in the concerned organisations can mostly of compared to the diversions on the road we face on account of big infrastructural projects or redoing of water / sewerage and other utilities which have be in the underbelly of the city. It is endless. As the expectation of a smooth city life ever remains distant, similarly, the extension of duration makes the heightened expectations from the software nose dive.
Anything uttered even in your dream during the process of software development becomes a Change Request, which is certainly more difficult to extract for free out of the IT Vendor than a constitutional amendment. The battle is always on, on the terms of the work order / contract till the level of syntax and this is not a battle of equals. Customer is the king needs to have role reversal in the IT software development game. The IT companies have got into the habit of calling the shots given the urgency and necessity of the product. Nothing can run without a software today.
The domain will always remain alien to them. How do you code when you don’t understand the domain? And more often than not the engineer does not understand the real nitty gritty of code as it is simply picked up from software libraries. Scope creep and not at par functional and software requirements created by or with the help of the customer draws a flak. No software development company would ever accept a mistake. This underbelly is the baggage we carry in the digital age.
QUALITY AND PACE OF SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS DEFINE THE NATION’S PACE IN THE DIGITAL AGE.