Quality Management Research Of Japanese Outsourcing Software Development In China: Using A Company As Example

As a recipient nation of software outsourcing, the software projects undertaking by Chinaalready expanded from the simple testing and encoding to the steps of demanding analysis andmaintenance in recent years. The business areas concerning with the software development alsogrown broadly. It indicated a huge marketing potential in software development, either to theJapanese-oriented or the Euro-American oriented.The Japanese software outsourcing has characters of low technically sophistication, highquality requirement and complex model diversity. It has certain difference with the Chinesesoftware development industry, which emphasized the technical aspects but neglected theprocessing of development controlling and documenting. Although the technical difficulty ofJapanese software outsourcing is lower but the demand on quality of them is almost impenetrable.The failed examples on software outsourcing caused by the unqualified quality are too numerousto list in China. Therefore, how to improve the quality of Japanese software outsourcing projectsalready become the restrictive points of Chinese software exportation to Japanese.Nowadays, the domestic company undertaking Japanese software outsourcing projectsusually takes the CMM (Capability Maturity Model) processing management method as referenceand establishes its own quality management system on the basis of ISO9001International QualityStandard. However, its own quality management method only confirms the software qualitythrough testing due to the limitation of experiences, programmers and cost. Alternatively, it meansthe software quality is accomplished by constant testing and correcting after the finishing of thewhole program. This lets the quality management of Japanese software outsourcing only dependson the testing after encoding process blindly, but cannot carry out the quality control on differentsteps in the software development process. In software engineering process, the cost of resolvingbugs increased with the consuming time of locating them. Therefore, the cost in softwaredeveloping process increases intangible through the sole method of testing after developmentfinishing. Moreover, it would let the company lose the positive control of software quality in the developing process. Thus, the prediction, processing management and evaluation of softwarequality are nothing to considerate.In this thesis, the author introduce the Japanese outsourcing software developing and qualitymanagement system using presetting “A” company as example and analyze the advantage anddisadvantage of the quality management system deeply form the processing, method andinstrument aspects in quality control. Fujitsu, Nippon Electric Company (NEC) and Hitachi areknown as three biggest in the software industry in Japan. The developing system and qualitymanagement system represents the common regular of Japanese Software Industry. Among them,the situation of Fujitsu and NEC are similar with the “A” company in this thesis. Thereby, NEC isintroduced as sample to describe the developing and quality management system in here. NECdeveloped its own method of quality management control on software development projectindependently from1982, named as Quality Accounting. Quality Accounting firstly sets thetargeting value from the starting of program, and then it evaluates or predicts the software qualityin the developing processing according to the practical data in different steps of project and thecondition of developing circumstance as well. Meanwhile, the application of “ObstructiveAnalysis” and “1+N Countermeasure” methods will help to correcting the problems in projectdeveloping process. Thereby the quality accounting will present the effective method to engagethe software with high reliable quality. The quality management systems are compared betweenNEC and “A” company after a systematical introduction of the quality management system inNEC. The problem in “A” company was cited and the possible improvement was presented.Though the investigation of this thesis, it expect introducing fresh strength into the qualitymanagement system and correcting the difficulty in quality management of “A” company basedon their existed situation.The result of this thesis would help to elevate the quality of production and customer’ssatisfaction as well as the turnover and profit of “A” company. Meanwhile the author also expectsthe result of this thesis would give valuable experiences which are worth to be considered by thecolleagues in corresponding areas.