March 2003
Volume 5 • Number 2

Contents

PROCESS IMPROVEMENT
Continuous Quality Improvements at a Silicon Valley High-Tech Software Company

by Giora Ben-Yaacov, Pramod Suratkar, Marsha Holliday, and Karen Bartleson

QUALITY OF HIGH-TECH SOFTWARE APPLICATIONS
Silicon Valley high-tech software product development teams are constantly striving to balance competing challenges: new technology developments, aggressive schedules, maintaining staff skill levels, making effective tradeoffs in software testing, and filling in incomplete knowledge of the product feature set that is preferred by most customers. Pressure is accentuated by the customers’ demand for “zero defects” in the shipped products and the end users’ need for prompt responses to quality issues during the chip design cycle (Ben-Yaacov, Goldman, and Stone 2001).

Under this kind of pressure, something, usually quality, has to give. Or does it? Quality is the fundamental cornerstone of any high-tech software organization—not an expendable
luxury. By turning the usual process around, beginning with quality rather than concluding with it, the rules of the zero-sum game can be changed. A foundation of quality makes everything run more smoothly and efficiently, leading to improvements on all fronts.

There are varying strategies for balancing internal demands and customer satisfaction goals. Before deciding to focus on a particular quality or business priority, it is useful to determine what’s important to the customer. When asking customers what they look for in a quality product, one will hear comments such as:

• “One that uses the latest and most appropriate technology”
• “Features that do special functions I need in my work”
• “One that regularly works the way it’s supposed to”
• “Decent support when I need help”

It all distills to the author’s definition of quality from the customer’s point of view: Quality = meeting and exceeding customer expectations.

The positive results of the software process improvement effort demonstrated that “investing in quality and customer satisfaction does indeed pay.” This is illustrated in the results of the 2002 EE Times survey shown in Figure 1. The EE Times Electronic Design Automation (EDA) survey was conducted in May 2002. The survey gathered responses from 506 chip designers who subscribe to EE Times or to Integrated System Design magazine. Among the EDA companies, the authors’ company, Synopsys, came out on top in almost all categories.

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