Quality Issues In System Development :: essays research papers fc

Quality Issues In System DevelopmentThe period surrounded by the 1970s and 1980s was a time of great advancement incomputer hardware technology which took an industry still in its infancy, to alevel of much mundanity and which ultimately revelutionised the informationstorage and processing needs of every other industry and that of the entireworld. However, it was also during this period when the shortcomings ofimplementing such technology became apparent. A momentous number ofdevelopment projects failed which resulted with disastrous consequences, notonly of an economic nature, but social aswell. Seemingly, although hardwaretechnolgy was readily available and ever improving, what was inhibiting theindustry was in the methods of implementing super systems. Consequently, allkinds of limited approaches materialized that avoided the costs and risksinherent in big-systems developments.Times have changed, and with it our understanding and experience as howbest to develop large systems . Todays large systems go bad greater benefits forless cost than those of previous decades. Large systems provide better, more thantimely information, the ability to fuse and correlate internal and externalinformation, the ability to integrate and facilitate streamlined businessprocesses. Unfortunately, not every system that information workers develop arewell implemented this means that the computer system which was soonerintended to make a company more efficient, productive and cost-effective, is inthe end doing the exact opposite - namely, wasting time, money and valuablemanpower. So flush with all the lessons learned from the 70s and 80s, ourvastly superior methodologies and knowledge of the 90s is still proving to befallible, as suggested in the following examples.System Development FailuresIn Britain, 1993, an incident occurred which oblige the LondonAmbulance Service to abandon its emergency system after it performeddisastrously on delivery, causing delays in answering calls. An independentinquiry ordered by British government agencies found that the ambulance servicehad accepted a suspiciously low bid from a small and inexperienced supplier. Theinquiry report, released in February 1993, contumacious that the system was fartoo small to cope with the data load. For an emergency service, the system errorwould not only cause the loss of money, but more essentially, fail to dispatchambulances correctly and promptly upon the arising of critical situations. Thus,the implications of such a failure are apparently obvious, both socially andeconomically. Since the failures, the ambulance service has reverted to a paper- ground system that will remain in place for the foreseeable future.Another failure was the collapse of the cop trading system of theLondon Stock Exchange. Taurus would have replaced the shuffling of six sorts of