Programme and Software Design

Using training to improve quality

Due to the rapid changes in the programming industry, training is necessary if businesses want to stay abreast with the latest techniques. Training also helps a business in recruiting the appropriate skills needed to manage promotions in the project management log. Businesses can also enjoy the most benefits out of newly released software engineering environment.

Incentive based Training

With all these benefits, it is common to see how little value people give to the training process. Businesses merely use training as an incentive to employees, using it to induce the interviewee to say 'yes'. Employees, particularly software developers, have little next to no training. Many companies propose this is fine by saying that, they already provide their employees with first hand training when they expose them to open projects.

What Independent Surveys Find

It was learned in a recent survey that software businesses that offer comprehensive and dedicated training to their hired software development professionals enjoy higher returns on investment and have a better quality of software development process. The findings of the survey were formed after evaluating software processes of around 63 software development businesses operating in the market at different levels, most of them in North America and Europe.

The survey also discovered some curious trends in the development process of a majority of businesses. It revealed that out of every three software business units, one business did not bother to give adequate training to their employees who got a week's worth of training ever y year. It was also revealed that half of the organizations operating in the market trained their software managers only once week every year.

The Capability Maturity Model

The Institute of Software Engineering has devised the Capability Maturity Model as a means to evaluate the quality of the software development process. For measuring the software process quality it uses the M and A index. M and A is a collective value that tracks efficiency across a range of different maturity levels. The higher aggregate points on the M and A index represent the highest quality of software development practices while a poor score reflects vice versa.
It is an ordeal to actually decide whether the objective for process quality establishes the level of employee training or if the employee training level contributes to the value of the software development process. It is clear, that a majority of the comapines surveyed did not give much emphasis to quality of work. Only a few software businesses implement quality control procedures like ISO 9000. This reflects how little value businesses put on training their software engineers, developers and designers.

Final conclusion

Software quality can often benefit the business and rarely can it be counter-productive. The data suggests that the process quality calculated by the M and A index is directly related to deadlines and budgets of the development projects being handle by the software firm. All this data indicates that software houses should invest in a comprehensive employee training program.