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From his post as a fellow at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute, IBM veteran Watts Humphrey, 73, has carried on a crusade for zero defects in software. But like W. Edwards Deming, whose principles of quality in manufacturing were ignored in the U.S. until Japanese auto makers successfully adopted his techniques, Humphrey's cry for quality has been largely overlooked by U.S. software companies.
In India and Brazil, however, Humphrey's quality-control approach has been heeded. Currently, of the 21 software companies worldwide that hold Humphrey's highest quality ratings (Level 5), including IBM and Motorola, 12 are based in India. And U.S. companies are starting to take note.
On Feb. 23, the first software quality institute outside of the U.S. was inaugurated in the southern Indian city of Madras. It is, appropriately, named after Humphrey. The modest, affable native of Battle Creek, Mich., is a World War II Navy veteran, who studied physics and earned an MBA at the University of Chicago before joining IBM in New York in 1959. During his 27 years at IBM, Humphrey was variously director of programming and in charge of the company's software labs. In 1986, he retired from IBM, joined Carnegie Mellon and began issuing his calls for higher software quality standards. Just before he inaugurated the Watts Humphrey Software Quality Institute, he spoke to Business Week Online's Manjeet Kripalani about his mission, how Microsoft can save $4 billion in development costs, and why Indian software companies are so successful. Edited excerpts follow:
Q: What is your mission regarding quality?
A: I believe software is the fundamental technology of the 21st century. It will become an inherent part of everything. Every engineer has to be competent in software. Software is taking ill-defined human needs and problems and defining them through the computer.... We're reducing them to human form.
But people have become so tangled up in computer science, that it is leading the community in the wrong direction. Everyone has a project to do in a hurry, and defects abound. So poor performance of this technology is holding back its development in every way.... But [people who develop software] are badly led and badly trained. For instance, Microsoft could have saved $4 billion in development costs with proper quality processes.
Q: What is the big issue for the software industry right now?
A: The business, largely governed by engineers, has poor planning abilities and poor quality. To be competitive, quality has to come first. What people are after is to meet aggressive goals, in a limited time and with crazy schedules. What's needed are aggressive but realistic goals.
Q: What does your quality process do?
A: It helps eliminate and/or massively reduce the amount of testing. Software is hard to manage. Hardware is inherently more manageable, it's just physical constructs. You don't have that with software. I'm not picking on Microsoft, but if my numbers are right, Microsoft spends 75% of software costs just testing, fixing defects. 50% of developing cost is spent on testing, and 50% of a developer's time is spent on fixing defects. They could cut that down, and cut half of the company's development costs. This is true of most organizations. A division of Boeing has saved 94% of its time in developing software by using quality processes.
Q: But the U.S. is filled with creative software talent. And those who make cutting-edge, innovative products, necessarily make mistakes as part of the creative process....
A: Yes, they make mistakes because they're human. But the techniques they use are flawed. The mechanics get in the way of creativity. It cuts down creativity. There are very few sophisticated design problems. One hundred fifty defects per 1,000 lines of code, that's what engineers inject into code. Fifty to 60 are just plain goofy coding mistakes. Just entering data, I make 1.3 errors per 1,000 key strokes. Translated into programming that's 20 defects per 1,000 lines of code. I consider that a high number, and that's just typing.
Engineers make mistakes all the time. They can't find 99.9% of defects before they system test. Then they don't understand the mistakes when they make them. If defects were a matter of life and death, then people would be more careful. They should record every defect and review it. When engineers have data on their own performance, they get better.
Q: So how can this be fixed?
A: By better education. It was difficult initially.... [Companies] wouldn't try [the quality-control processes] without evidence. And you can't get evidence without trying it. So companies continued using the historical measure -- what they'd been doing all along, the one with mistakes. They wouldn't change. I'd hear companies say over and over again, "O.K., we'll try your way after this project is over because we're in a hurry." So I decided to teach a course in the subject.
Q: What's been the result?
A: With the quality process, productivity has more than doubled. Even with companies that have the highest rating, the time for testing software is reduced by a factor of nine. It's defect-free product delivery. And team turnover is zero. People end up liking their work. The hard part is changing the behavior of executives. It's not the engineers in a company, it's the managers that are the hardest to change.
Q: Where do Indian companies stand? They may have the highest ratings, but because they aren't as innovative as U.S. companies, isn't it easier for them to simply follow processes?
A: I talk to software people everywhere. But talk to the Indian folks, and they're doing things. They've got a somewhat different attitude. The feeling here in India is they have to do something different to break in. In the U.S., the action-oriented thing is getting the product out fast. Indians listen and implement. Now, they're working on the personal and team software processes for engineers, and we'll have to see how they do. It takes effort, discipline, and training. When people are well managed, with the right training and environment, there's marvelous work.
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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