Consortium Confronts Software-Quality IssuesConsortium Confronts Software-Quality Issues

Project Slam, a new quality-assurance effort from Microsoft, is being used to check for bugs and coding errors in Windows software. It includes first-time use of research that came out of Carnegie Mellon University's engineering department 10 years ago. The time gap between research and real-world application is one of the issues Carnegie Mellon hopes to address with the Sustainable Computing Consortium, a group of 45 vendor and user companies that are working with academics to address software-quality issues.

It's a huge challenge, but efforts like the consortium are encouraging, considering that past vendor-customer dialogue around software quality frequently deteriorated into finger-pointing: Companies accused vendors of selling shoddy software, and vendors retorted that problems occur when customers don't implement or use software correctly.

Vendors now realize being defensive doesn't save their reputation. Of the sites monitoring software quality in information Research's Software Quality survey, 82% say they have avoided using a vendor because of a reputation for poor-quality code. This percentage remains steady for the study's small, midsize, and large companies.

What's more, respondents say the industry has more work to do. Just 2% say they're highly satisfied with the software industry's ability to produce bug-free software. And most customers aren't afraid to speak up: 88% of those surveyed say they ask their vendors to fix quality problems when they arise.

What is your software vendor doing to ensure your company's purchases meet expectations? Let us know at the address below.

Mary Hayes
Senior Writer
[email protected]

Deal Breaker

Has your company decided not to buy software from a vendor because of a reputation for poor-quality code?

While most companies are unwilling to risk their reputation or operations on commercial software that could prove problematic, some businesses aren't so concerned. In fact, 18% of sites surveyed by information Research have purchased software from a vendor known for poor-quality code. Considering that 90% of sites attribute higher costs and revenue losses to software bugs and errors, one has to wonder whether this is the wisest of business decisions.

Action Plan

If the third-party software you're relying on is of poor quality, what are you most likely to do?

Not all customers ask their vendors to fix software that proves inadequate or rely on them to provide patches to correct errors. Nearly a third of sites surveyed ask their own programmers to fix the problem, while 17% suffer with the software because it's paid for. Yet approximately a quarter of companies won't stand for buggy software. Fourteen percent of sites say they immediately shop for an alternative, and 9% stop using software applications that are too buggy.

Few Rave

How trustworthy is the quality of the products and services of your company's most strategic commercial software vendor?

PeopleSoft earlier this month said it would spend hundreds of millions of dollars to improve its software, and other vendors have also made quality proclamations in the past year. Such efforts may already be mending some vendor-customer relationships. Among the companies experiencing software bugs, 31% consider their most strategic software vendor to be extremely trustworthy, while 62% consider the vendor somewhat trustworthy. However, 7% depend on a vendor that they don't trust at all.

Quality Counts

Does quality play a part in your company's selection process when choosing a software vendor?

Efforts by the Sustainable Computing Consortium to improve software quality come just at the right time. More than three-quarters of the 198 companies in information's survey monitoring the performance of their software apps say that software quality is a significant consideration when choosing a software vendor, and just one in five considers it a minor matter. Only 3% report that software quality isn't a factor when selecting a software vendor.