Quality assurance is the process of verifying or determining whether products or services meet or exceed customer expectations. Quality assurance is a process-driven approach with specific steps to help, define and attain goals. This process takes into consideration the design, development, production, and service.

Today, companies greatly value quality assurance because it helps them keep a check on the quality of their products and services. A good quality product or service ends with a satisfied and loyal customers and that is the main goal of every entrepreneur. A business that compromises on quality in the long run loses out on loyal customers. To ensure that customers are happy with the quality of their products and services, companies employ a variety of scientific measures for quality assurance. Since most businesses are often short-staffed, quality assurance is usually handed over to market research companies. These companies use several different methods to see where the company stands on quality issues.

Once the quality assurance process is carried out, the results are evaluated and the company applies actions necessary for improvement if the results require changes. If customers are particularly enjoying some aspect of their service or product, the company must ensure that quality aspect is maintained. Improvements may involve a variety of factors such as improving the product or even improving the services provided by an employee at a store.

Once a software product undergoes different stages of development phase, a big task is to employ software quality assurance strategies to ensure the adaptation of the end product in the company’s environment. The quality assurance of a software product is an ongoing process, which begins as soon as software is in its nascent stage of development. The company offering offshore software development solutions, often works in association with management team to assure the quality of product. Thus, a key role is played by management team in making the end product adhered to process and procedure.

A software quality assurance group is an important part and parcel of software development and its acceptance afterwards. Here are few most important roles played by professionals in this group:

•The quality assurance people have the task to ensure flexibility of product developed by a software development offshore company. The end product must be capable of getting adapted in atmosphere of different companies installing it.

•Another task of people involved in quality assurance procedures of software is to ensure the customization characteristics of product to be delivered at end. Again, the product must be capable of being customized according to the needs of different companies.

•The people engaged in software quality assurance must ensure that the end product is going to meet all the standards, processes and procedures already prevailing in different types of companies.

Configuration management is the detailed recording and updating of information that describes an enterprise computer systems and networks, including all hardware and software components. Such information typically includes the versions and updates that have been applied to install software packages, the locations, and network addresses of hardware devices. Special configuration management software is available. When a system needs hardware or software upgrade, a computer technician can access the configuration management program and database to see what is currently installed. The technician can then make a more affirmative decision whether the upgrade is required.

An advantage of a configuration management is that the entire collection of systems can be checked to make sure that any changes made to a system do not adversely affect the other systems.

Configuration management is also used in software development, where it is called Unified Configuration Management (UCM). Using UCM, developers can keep track of the source code, documentation, problems, changes requested, and changes made.

Configuration management, as we know it today, started in the late 1960s. In the 1970s, the American government developed a number of military standards that includes the configuration management. Later, especially in the 1990s, many other standards and publications emerged that discussed configuration management. In the last few years, the growing understanding of software development as a collection of interrelated processes has influenced work on configuration management. This means that configuration management is now also considered from a process point of view.

Configuration management comprises of five elements:

•Configuration Identification: Identify and document the product design and the physical product; establish baselines.

•Configuration Control: Identify and resolve problems; manage the configuration and design change process

•Configuration Audits: Verify CM processes

•Configuration Status Reporting: Provide CM information to all who need it

•Configuration management Planning: Identify, negotiate and document CM processes for each program; establish roles and responsibilities

All the activity areas in configuration management share metadata for items placed under configuration management. Metadata is a database concept that means data about the data stored in the database. So metadata in this context describes the configuration items. Metadata for a configuration item may include its name, the name of the person who produced the item, the production date, and references to other related configuration items.

Determining the success of a product development and test effort is a matter of ensuring that the organization has delivered a product that meets its customers’ quality expectations. An organization must measure several dimensions of the development and testing to determine whether it has been successful in meeting quality goals.

Developing a measurement strategy

A measurement strategy should address four key aspects:

•Process: Metrics for the effectiveness and efficiency of the test process, which address the consistency of test efforts, either by comparing current efforts with past performance or by measuring the consistency of test activities for different teams within an organization.

•Quality: Metrics that address the quality of the entity being tested, typically it addresses both the volume and the severity of defects.

•Schedule: Metrics that assess the overall schedule with adherence to the test plan or comparing the duration per test phase against past programs.

•Cost: Metrics that measure investments in a particular test project.

Building a measurement infrastructure

Prior to implementing a measurement strategy, an organization must create a measurement infrastructure to track the number and type of defects reported during the development and test process as well as the number of resources allocated to test activities.

Defect-tracking system

A defect-tracking system can be as simple as a local database or as sophisticated as one of the many defect-tracking tools available today. A key characteristic of a defect-tracking system is the ability to categorize defects by problem area, state, and severity. The state of a defect is its current phase in the defect life cycle. Defect phases include created, fixed, closed, assigned, and rejected.

Resource-tracking system

A resource-tracking system is necessary to measure the number of hours spent on test activities. Useful metrics include the number of total hours spent on the project (for planning, execution, and reporting), the number of manual or automated test hours, and the number of hours spent during each test phase.

Goals and standards

Goals and standards are the benchmarks in a measurement system. These may be defined as a percentage improvement over historical programs, or they may be based on an industry source or a best practice from another organization doing similar work.

Identifying key measurements

A measurement system needs to provide metrics in three categories: operational, project assessment, and business.

Operational metrics

Operational metrics are designed to measure the project progress during the test execution phase—whether that phase is unit, product, or system testing. Organizations may use these metrics to assess the stability of the product at a given point of time, release readiness, adherence to test entrance and exit criteria. Common operational metrics are: Defect management, Defect arrival rate, Defect incoming/ closure gap, Defect aging, and Test execution progress.

Project assessment metrics

A key objective of any organization is to execute the test cycle for a given project according to the test plan. Project assessment metrics are designed to provide the organization with feedback on the efficiency of test planning, execution, and reporting efforts. Common project assessment metrics are: Mean time to close, Test plan effectiveness, Invalid defect rate, Adherence to resource plan, Defect incoming rate by test phase, Defect closure rate by test phase, Volatility index, and Schedule adherence.

Business metrics

Business metrics address whether an organization is executing tests with consistency and improving in its test efforts. It compares test planning, execution, and reporting efforts with historical efforts of a similar type. Business metrics are typically reviewed monthly or quarterly. Common business metrics are: Defect discovery accuracy, Test plan effectiveness, Test case execution profile, Adherence to resource plan, Adherence to capital plan, Field escapes, Defect incoming rate by test phase, Defect closure rate by test phase, and Schedule adherence.

Gauging the success of test efforts

The primary goal of measuring the development and test process is to ensure that enterprises are meeting the quality expectations of customers. Quality measures indicate whether a product is performing to the specifications defined by the marketing team and implemented by the product development group.

Business intelligence is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. Business intelligence applications include the activities of decision support systems, query and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining.

Business Intelligence becomes effective when it provides insight and helps you to predict outcomes. Business Intelligence helps you to track your mistakes, control your present, and forecast future results based on your business decisions. Business Intelligence gives the maximum benefit to customers in terms of cost savings, improved quality, access to highly talented professionals, flexibility of operations, and reduced time to market. Business intelligence services are driven towards customer’s current and future needs in mind, providing feature-rich solutions that are built on standard technologies. BI services have helped customers and partners increase productivity and efficiency by transforming data into actionable information.

Business Intelligence solutions can:

• Reduce the total cost of managing and delivering information

• Support self-service access to information for employees, partners, and clients

• Promote collaboration/workflow

• Automate legacy processes

• Reduce cost of business operations

Some of the Business Intelligence services are:

• Reporting: Provides you the access of a complete list of report types. The reporting capability helps you to personalize the style and quality of business intelligence delivered to your key stakeholders so that you are able to expand the community of business intelligence users.

• Analysis: Enables the guided exploration of information that pertains to all dimensions of your business, regardless of where the data is stored. The analysis solution in BI helps to analyze and report against online analytical processing (OLAP) and dimensionally aware relational sources. The analysis capability helps you to personalize the style and quality of business intelligence delivered to the client. OLAP tools, such as Business Objects and Hyperion are geared towards slicing and dicing of the data.

• Dashboards: Help in the communication of complex information quickly. Dashboards translate information from your various corporate systems and data into visually rich presentations, using gauges, maps, charts, and other graphical elements to show multiple results together. Dashboards are operational, tactical, and strategic helping you to monitor, measure, and manage corporate performance.

Custom software development refers to the omission of predeveloped solutions and views by developing custom approaches of solving the problems of a customer. Custom software development helps to find new creative decisions in order to meet the specific requirements and preferences of the customer.

Custom software development is encouraged to take under one hat the most progressive technologies along with preferences and expectations of the customer. Custom software development may be designed in stage by stage processes, allowing all nuances and possible hidden dangers to be taken into account, including issues which were not mentioned in the specifications.

As competition is increasing day by day in the market, custom web development is emerging as an answer to offer tailor-made solutions to meet the specific needs of the clients. Looking at the present scenario, the significance of customized software can not be ignored as many business firms prefer to encourage custom software development, which helps in saving your money and time. All software development companies are emphasizing and searching for tailored, cost-effective, and high quality scalable custom solutions that can deliver quick results.

There will be a boom in the IT world and we will definitely experience a radical change on using custom software development solutions. However, it is important to understand that any custom software development can only be effective if you select a software development company which helps you grow in the industry. Every custom software development begins with studying the business requirements, preparation of records, execution of plans, and following standard software development life cycle processes at each stage of the project.

With the growth of technology and rapid development in the Indian IT sector, a large number of upcoming software development companies are using custom software development to cater the needs of their clients. Most of the software development companies will develop your software very precisely after studying your requirements thoroughly. The advantages of using custom software development services in India are the quality of work and cost effectiveness. In India, dedicated people work in the field of information technology providing better results at an affordable price.

Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to methodologies, software, and internet capabilities, which help an enterprise to manage customer relationships in an organized way. For example, if an enterprise builds a database about its customers describing relationships in a sufficient detail so that management, sales persons, service providers, and perhaps the customer can directly access information, match customer needs with product plans and offerings, remind customers of service requirements, and know what other products a customer had purchased.

According to industry view, customer relationship management (CRM) consists of:

• Helping an enterprise to enable its marketing departments to identify and target their best customers, manage marketing campaigns, and generate quality leads for the sales team.
• Assisting the organization to improve telesales, accounts, and sales management by optimizing information shared by multiple employees and streamlining existing processes. For example, taking orders using mobile devices.
• Allowing the formation of individualized relationships with customers, with the aim of improving customer satisfaction and maximizing profits; identifying the most profitable customers and providing them with the highest level of service.
• Providing employees with the information and processes necessary to know their customers for understanding and identifying customer needs and effectively building relationships between the company, its customer base, and distribution partners.
• Identifying and targeting their best customers, generate quality sales leads, and plan and implement marketing campaigns with clear goals and objectives.
• Customer relationship management tools include software and browser-based applications that collect and organize information about their customers. For example, as part of their CRM strategy, a business may use a database of customer information to help construct a customer satisfaction survey, or decide which new products their customers might be interested in.

Many organizations turn to CRM software for helping them to manage their customer relationships. Customer relationship management (CRM) technology is offered on-premise, on-demand or through Software as a Service (SaaS) CRM, depending on the vendor. Mobile CRM and the open source CRM software model have also been gaining popularity these days.

A few years back, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) began to explore the options of outsourcing non-core activities to outsourced product development firms. They realized that in doing so, they can concentrate more on the core activities, such as conceiving new product ideas and marketing of the new launches. What further heightens the drive to outsource product development is the rising wages and reduced product life.

The lull in the economy is a reality, however, it has become a fact that to stay competitive, ISVs are now under more pressure to cut down product cost and the time to market apart from the technical aspects of reducing product life cycle and preventing product from reaching a stage of technology obsolescence. Outsourced Product Development can still make all this possible even without feeling the pinch of the economic recession.

This explains the reason why the world frets over the current global economic meltdown and the impending recession, the Indian outsourced product development firms are still optimistic. They foresee a surge in demand once the crisis is over. It may sound curious; the current turmoil has not been able to affect the Outsourced Product Development companies in India.

According to a recent report by Business Line, the outsourced product development firms here are gearing up for an anticipated surge in outsourcing once the dust settles down.

Various industry sources confirm that the recession has not affected the sales figures yet. Reportedly a number of new clients have been added to the portfolios of several Outsourced Product Development firms during this period. The business from the mid- size to comparatively large ISVs continues to grow. Only the small ISVs are holding back new projects since the venture capitalists funding them have been more or less affected by the turbulent times.

The overall reaction of Indian outsourced product development firms to the slowdown in the economy is that of watchful optimism. Almost all of them are looking forward to the proverbial silver lining that every cloud has.

The Independent Software Vendors, today, not only want better features in new products but also want them faster. Therefore, it is imperative that they look at capitalizing on a partnership with a professional offshore product development company to beat competition, gain faster time-to-market and reduce their initial investment in-terms of time, money, and effort. More important among these is the fact that an offshore product development company can assist an independent software vendor to stay competitive, which is the main requirement today. Across the industry, an intensely competitive market means shrinking product life cycles, growing technical complexities, shorter release cycles, and an ever-faster time-to-market.

Benefits of Offshoring Product Development

Offshoring Product Development companies, today, are completely focused on developing products. Although, offshore product development started as a tool for labor arbitrage, today, the benefits gained by independent software vendor are more and it includes higher quality, development discipline, and significant value addition in terms of process efficiencies and innovation.

Product development is one of the fastest-growing segments of the offshore services market. As companies across a range of verticals, from aerospace to medical instruments, grapple to add more value-added software to their product while cutting their overall research and development costs, as a result, offshore segment expands dramatically. Offshoring product development requires that we take ownership of the product development from architecture, system, and business prospect. With help of the core business or technical team, they deliver quality product development throughout the life cycle of the product.

The Offshoring Product Development companies, today, offer both core and non-core services. Below are some of the services being offered by them:

•New Product development / definition

•Product migration and re-engineering

•Product customization

•Web-enablement

•QA and test automation, full product testing

•Product support

•Product integration / professional services

•Documentation

The Offshoring Product Development companies even offer innovative prototypes and proof-of-concepts to visualize the end product. They bring in greater bandwidth to develop multiple versions of the independent software vendor product thereby enabling the ISV to gain a faster time- to-market.

Considering that the Offshoring Product Development companies, today, offer more than just the programming services at lower costs, the independent software vendor should strategically leverage a partnership with an Offshoring Product Development to get significant value in-terms of on-demand services that will help garner a greater market share.

Wireless application development is a method of developing applications for wireless devices designed to provide technology-independent access to the Internet and advanced telephony services. It is an open standard for applications that uses wireless communication. The best part of the application development is that it facilitates mobile users with wireless devices to simply access and network the information and services instantly. Moreover, wireless application can be developed on any operating system, such as PalmOS, Windows CE, and JavaOS.

The increasing popularity of these applications enabled us to have a platform where one can easily switch the information flow between Internet and wireless operator networks. This technology also offers an easy-to-use and extremely convenient communications and information tool.

Beyond standardizing, the factors, such as wireless application reliability and flexibility have also enabled many companies to allow their employees to access mobile data. Employees can access a full series of corporate services and information anywhere and any time using this technology. This technology acts as a service platform, which is a major advantage and making it as a preferred choice. This technology also helps in enabling rapid pilot solutions and conducting online business in secure and well-organized manner.

However, while creating wireless applications there are some major architecture types that one has to take care of:

• Smart client applications permitting offline access to vital data and providing integration with enterprise data sources for periodic updates.

• Online-only (dumb) wireless internet applications provide real-time browser-based content to wireless devices.

Living in modern technology-oriented world has helped us to send all the critical information and messages within a matter of seconds. With the boom in communication technology, there has been extreme increase in the growth of wireless application development companies. These days many firms have started providing appropriate wireless applications to fit your wireless needs by making the best use of wireless technologies, such as WML Script, J2ME, and XML. Today we view this technology as an extension to web applications that allow data to be accessed via remotely handheld devices, like cell phones.

Product engineering is an engineering discipline that deals with both design and manufacturing aspects of a product. Product engineering usually entails activity dealing with issues of cost, produce-ability, quality, performance, reliability, serviceability and user features. These product characteristics are generally sought after to make the resulting product attractive in today’s competitive market and also act as a medium to increase profit for its buyers by providing quality assurance services.

Increased consumer demand for innovative electronic products at lower costs presents tremendous challenges for the companies trying to satisfy both requirements. For manufacturers, survival is determined not only by product differentiation, but by how quickly products can be brought to market in a new geography or category. These requirements of markets have given rise to outsourcing in the Product Engineering services space.

The benefits of product engineering services include:

•Support and enhancement for the existing products

•New functionality development

•Product porting to multiple platforms

•Building new tools and utilities in the product

•Avoid staffing ’spikes’ during engineering projects

•Reduced Costs and schedules

•Improved service levels for customers

•Time to market advantage

The product engineering services approach is to work with your organization and to create a support organization which assumes complete or partial product responsibility. This includes porting, second and third level support, bug fixing, patch and release management, enhancements, tools and utilities, performance measurement and tuning and third party software integration. The full range of Product Engineering services, include:

•Industrial Design

•Mechanical Design

•Tooling Design

•Electronic System Design

•ASIC/FPGA Design

•Services

•Verification Products

•Design Validation Testing

•Compliance and Regulatory Testing

•Production Test Development

•Industrialization and Prototyping.

Today, product engineering service is well on its way to become a mature industry, akin to civil engineering and architectural services. Business wizards are naming engineering as “the last frontier of business-process outsourcing”. Apart from Software Development Outsourcing, nowadays, from design to production and maintenance, most engineering functions can also be outsourced successfully. It is the hottest trend in business-process outsourcing, and for excellent rationale.

Enterprise Architecture has become a common practice for large IT organizations. For the first time there is a methodology to encompass the various IT aspects and processes into a single practice. However, realizing the full potential of Enterprise Architecture (EA) can be challenging. There are many aspects to EA, including architecture planning, governance, taxonomies and ontology, all of which impact its success. Without the right guidance, tools, frameworks and methodologies, EA can quickly become unwieldy.

The enterprise architectures act as an asset in finding effective ways of using technology. When they don’t work well, they can be a huge counterproductive drain on precious organizational resources. All too often, it is the latter case that is realized.

You can not afford to ignore the potential benefits of well done enterprise architecture. These benefits include decreased costs, increased revenues, improved processes, and expanded business opportunities. Also, you can’t afford to ignore the risks of getting mired in bad enterprise architecture. These risks include astronomical expenses, technological gridlock, and diminished executive credibility.

For corporate firms and software enterprises, it is very essential to have an architectural planning and strategy through which they are able to analyze their business needs and gain logical solutions related to their necessities. Also, it is very essential to implement the methodology and process of enterprise architecture through which the structure of the business, its priorities and needs can be properly understood and defined in an effective manner.

In the enterprise architecture process, experts start the project by studying thoroughly the business structure and create a framework, which effectively describes the infrastructure. The next stage involves strategic planning, implementation of the tools and process where the experts systematically adapt methodologies to execute the task. The enterprise architect however, like a city planner, frames the city-wide design, and choreographs other activities into the larger plan.

Delivered successfully, enterprise architecture has the potential to allow both the business and IT strategies drive each other. Therefore, effective enterprise architecture may be regarded as one of the key means of achieving competitive advantage through information technology.

Today, businesses have no boundaries and are growing far and wide, the need for proper communication within an organization and with its business partners, have become a mandatory tool. The need to connect people at all times has revolutionized the communication industry with mobile technology playing the biggest role in recent years and moreover here to stay for a long time.

Wireless application services allow the user access information anywhere-any time. Companies have developed expertise in wireless application development that has helped the companies to improve workflow, customer order taking, and record keeping at the front office. The increased popularity of the application has enabled the companies to easily handle the increased demands on operator’s systems and more gateways to switch the information flow between internet and wireless operator networks. It also offers an easy-to-use and extremely convenient communications and information tool.

Today, the concept of developing an application based on this technology has changed the way we communicate to each other. Beyond standardizing for greater ease of transferability, the factors like wireless application reliability and flexibility has also enabled many companies to allow their employees to access mobile data.

It also allows employees to access a full series of corporate services and information from anywhere, at any time. Mentioning about some of the major features of this technology that makes it as preferred choice is it acts as service platform enabling real-time mobile access to corporate applications and data. It also helps in enabling rapid pilot solutions and conducting business online in secure and well-organized manner.

Some of the wireless application development services are:

• Programming services on Windows Mobile Pocket PC based Devices.
• A service platform enabling real-time mobile access to corporate applications and data.
  • Connected and Disconnected Mode Application.
  • M-Commerce Applications.
  • SMS Push-Pull Applications.
  • Testing and live support for all Mobile Applications.

Offshore Software Development is the practice of contracting with an external supplier positioned in a country that is geographically remote from the client enterprise; a type of offshore outsourcing. The main reason behind the companies to use offshore software development services is the higher development cost of the local service providers. The global software R&D services market when compared to ITO and BPO market is rather young and currently at the early stages of its development, but India is leading the world in this field.

Software development, including stand-alone applications, network applications and Web-based sites and business applications can now be done easily and inexpensively offshore. Here, we focus on the background that is behind the success of outsourcing and offshore software development that has lured the companies to consider offshore software development for their future projects.

Offshore Software Development is not new. Companies throughout North America have been using developers in Israel and India for over 20 years with excellent results and high ROI. Although, you may not have heard much about this – many of the products developed and marketed by some leading American companies are, in reality, developed abroad, or developed by foreign workers employed locally.

The software development is done entirely offshore. Client is contacted through electronic communications. Sometimes, short visits or exchanges of personnel take place. These exchanges happen only if you have a product or service upon which the developer must be trained before being able to participate and be productive on your project.

Benefits of Offshore Software Development

Virtually every client has slightly different needs and expectations about how Offshore Software Development can benefit them. Some of them have been broken down into these main categories:

•Cost reduction

•Time to market

•Experienced team members

•Skills and development

•Access to the latest, hard-to-find skills

•Flexible teams, team scalability and employment terms

Today, India is a leader in offshore software development. Best Software Development Companies of the world are from India. Many companies have realized that offshore outsourcing of their core application development to India is beneficial and will fetch them faster turn around times and greater return on investment (ROI). Thus, it has become very attractive to hire Indian software professionals for either end-to-end development or product co-development. Many Independent Software Vendors are partnering with Indian companies for achieving success in their businesses.

Testing is a necessary stage in the software development life cycle. It gives the programmer and user some sense of correctness, though never a “proof of correctness”. Testing the product means adding value to it by raising the quality or reliability of the product. Raising the reliability of the product means finding and removing bugs. Hence one should not test a product to show that it works; rather, one should start with the assumption that the program contains bugs and then test the program to find as many bugs as possible. As a software tester you shouldn’t be content at just finding bugs, you should think about how to find them sooner in the development process, thus making them cheaper to fix.

Some examples to test in software –

One of the areas left untested most often is interface error handling. Usually we try to make sure our system can handle all our errors, but we never plan for the other systems’ errors or for the unexpected. Try leaving the site mid-transaction – what happens? Does the order complete anyway? Try losing the Internet connection from the user to the server. Try losing the connection from the server to the credit card verification server. Is
there proper error handling for all these situations? Are charges still made to credit cards? If the interruption is not user initiated, does the order get stored so a customer service executive can call back if the user doesn’t come back to the site?

Does the layout still look good on 64-0×400 or 600×800? Are the fonts too small to read? Are they too big? Does all the text and graphic alignment still work?

Nowadays, the healthcare field uses software for critical treatment and bugs in such software directly affect human life. To avoid manual errors in medical software there are various regulations like FDA, GAMP, CAP and F10K.

There are some valuable lessons that need to be learned before choosing a testing methodology and processes. The following list provides some rules to follow as an aid to effective and beneficial software testing.

1. Always test against a specification. If tests are not developed from a specification, then it is not testing. Hence, testing totally relies on adequate specifications of software.
2. Document the testing process; specify tests and record test results.
3. Develop a master test plan so that resources and responsibilities are understood and assigned as early in the project as possible.
4. Plan verification and validation activities.
5. Distribute testing and evaluation responsibility to every member, so as to generate team responsibility among all team members.
6. Test hierarchically against each level of specification. Finding more bugs at the development stage will ultimately reduce costs.
7. Always test positively, that the software does what it should, but also negatively, that it does not do what it should not.
8. Have the right attitude to testing; it should be taken as a challenge and not the assignment.
9. Conduct Reviews as early as possible to provide developer feedback and get problems found and fixed as they occur.
10. True testing is to verify that all project deliverables and components are complete, to demonstrate and track true project progress.

Hopefully this article will be helpful in your day to day work of software testing as well as development.

Product innovation is the result of bringing to life a new way to solve the customer’s problem – through a new product or service development that benefits both the customer and the sponsoring company. The myth that products are developed by lone geniuses in their labs, who turn sudden inspiration into practical innovation, certainly isn’t true today. Reality is far more complex. Talent and inspiration are necessary but not sufficient. To create and launch nearly any new product today requires many people with many different skills.

Innovation calls for vision and conviction. Innovation being the starting point to build a software product company, vision helps us come up with a product idea. And innovation helps us make the product highly suited for the targeted application.

Products can be grouped into ‘absolutely essential’, ‘need to have’, ‘nice to have’ and ‘frill’. One of the reasons for the bankruptcies of product companies during the tech downturn was that their products fell into the last two categories. Our process was to choose a few areas in the domain that we were familiar with. Then we used filters to qualify each, and thereby arrive at a shortlist. The next step was to speak with potential users of the shortlisted ideas. Finally, we applied a huge dose of ‘gut feel’ to choose the product.

The next step is to formulate a sound strategy, such as covering markets to be addressed, sales channel, marketing methodology, product management, and support. From a market perspective, addressing a developing market (if market for the product exists in such geographies) and establishing a reference base in that market might prove to be quite helpful before addressing a developed market. Depending on the complexity and size of the product being developed, it takes three-five years for the product to stabilize, and for the company to start making reasonable profits. Also, obtaining a beta site and ironing out issues in the product takes a fairly long time. Companies need to prepare themselves for this long gestation period with respect to funding, morale of personnel and staying power. The ride to profitability could be accelerated through tight cost controls. Even with that, profitability is a long way off compared to the services business.

The most critical and expensive aspect of the business: Product companies typically have to invest four times the amount invested in development, in sales and marketing. There is really no limit to the possibilities of expenses in this space, and calls for substantial attention to strategizing, planning and execution.

Product innovation is the soul of an enterprise business process; the fluidity with which this business process is performed ultimately determines profit margin, share of market, and long-term business success. Likewise, product innovation includes new product development delivery cycles and time to market, both of which are key differentiators in determining a company’s competitive advantage.

Business Process Management (BPM) — the ability to define and execute business functions independent of applications or infrastructure — may sound like a stuffy concept, but a few small companies are steadfastly clinging to it for success in a time when controlling company workflow is seen as a way of paring total-cost-of-ownership.

In today’s economic environment, competitive edge is all about the organization’s agility and quick responsiveness to the emerging business opportunities. IT complexity and its inability to change with the volatile business environment, invariably lead businesses to increasing costs and effort. Here, a BPM solution comes to the forefront by providing you the ability to model manage and optimize your core business processes.

Benefits of Business Process Management:

•Improves business agility

•Improves process control

•Improves customer satisfaction

•Reduces cost

•Compliance with regulations

•Engenders continuous process improvement

Business Process Management software is an integrated collection of critical software technologies that enables the control and management of business processes.

BPM Software emphasizes business user involvement in the entire business process improvement life cycle, from design through implementation, deployment, monitoring and ongoing optimization. Instead of reducing reliance on employees, Business Process Management software emphasizes the added value of employee activity coordination and making their business activities transparent and auditable. As a software infrastructure platform, BPM software enables business and IT professionals to close the execution gap between IT and the business.

Business Process Management suites enable business stakeholders to monitor all interactions between human, system and information resources and optimize behavior to get the most out of dynamic market events and improve business performance outcomes. BPM Software is a model-driven workflow environment that makes the model executable, while keeping the model as the central focus for future process changes. The graphical model is actually metadata that is translated by software into the executed process dynamically.

Business process management software solutions are one of the hottest areas in Business Process Management (BPM). At the moment, about two dozen companies offer business process management suites, which feature a jumble of tools, templates and frameworks. As more and more vendors enter this growing marketplace, business process management suites will add new features and new capabilities, further complicating the issue.

Corporations around the world have adopted Offshore Software Development as a successful business strategy. A critical part of the Offshore IT Outsourcing strategy, offshore software development provides companies with business flexibility in terms of focusing on their core competencies, while at the same time offering them exclusive cost-effective solutions for their business requirements.

Offshore software development is a provision of software development services by an external supplier positioned in a country that is geographically remote from the client enterprise. The main reason behind the companies to use offshore software development services is the higher development cost of the local service providers.

For companies just starting up, the benefits of offshore software development are immense, as it permits them to leverage their IT budget and resources without hiring expensive programmers to implement their design. Outsourcing software requirements to India has, of late, become a strategy adopted in several companies around the globe. Currently, more than 200 of the Fortune 500 companies have accepted Offshore Outsourcing as a part of their overall business policy and with a greater number of companies looking forward to Offshore Software Development in India.

The success of any Outsourcing Software Development project depends on many factors; one of them is how well the vendor understands the client’s business process and can then convert it into IT solutions, thereby fulfilling the client’s needs and requirements. Today, Outsourcing Software Development vendors invest a lot for gaining domain and technical expertise and have succeeded in becoming leaders in many industries and technologies. This change in Outsourcing Software Development market has made the local consultancy augmenting offshore software development an integral part of complex offshore software projects.

Advantages of Outsourcing Software Development:

• Getting access to specialized labor at low rates

• Cutting human resource costs

• Cutting operational costs

• Reducing software project expenditure

•Ensuring proper project management

• Software research at lower rates

• Reducing training costs

Offshore software development has become a trend in the technology sector owing to an array of its multi-dimensional benefits over the complexities of in-house development.

Today, outsourcing product development is no longer seen as an option for repetitive, non-innovative, and non-strategic functions; it is increasingly being evaluated and regarded as a viable option for more strategic business functions. Factors such as cost efficiency, focus on core business, access to technology, time to market, access to global expertise, among others are the reasons for outsource product development that leverage quality and development discipline to the product as well.

Outsourced product development or software development provides the complete software solutions to give the company a greater satisfaction level. Services may include software solutions, network outsourcing services, application services in areas including finance, retail, and real estate through diversified value for customers. Product development may also include process enhancement, organizational intranet projects, and document management. In this competitive business market, outsourced product development has emerged as one of the promising market of the development. Therefore, sharpening of business skill and developing better satisfaction methodologies are important. If you want to outsource product development solutions, make sure you choose the best one which fulfills your business requirements in most effective manner.

Outsource product development has caught the imagination of the entire business world. Sometimes, an enterprise opts for outsourced product development to manage costs, boost bottom line and save time for core activities. Other times, some strategic purposes such as dispense with some centers located at critical geographical regions have been bearing on the option for outsource product development. There are several reasons that can be cited for outsourcing option.

Outsourcing product development is useful, when:

•There is a need for expertise, the company doesn’t have or need full time involvement.

•There is a need for resources; the company currently does not have to complete all of the required work.

•Expenses are incurred heavy if internal teams are kept to do some or all of the development projects.

•There is a desire to incorporate standard practices or fresh approach in the product development processes.

•There is a need for reducing product life cycle.

•The product has to be prevented from reaching a stage of technology obsolescence.

•There is a need to build modular, tightly integrated product to add on functionality.

Most would agree that firms that don’t usually outsource product development, should periodically do so, to know, how they could improve the results of their internal development teams. To glean the maximum benefits, the firm outsourcing the product development should have systems in place to imbibe within the lessons-learned and to integrate them into its systems where it is appropriate.

Custom software development has now become the need for any business. Companies running businesses on-line, has to keep their software updated with the latest technologies to gain a competitive edge and customer satisfaction. Also, these companies end up in saving a lot of time, resources, and money invested in maintaining the software.

These days IT world is facing new revolution named Custom Software Development. It is not a new technology in IT field but certainly this concept has redefined the IT industry and number of specific functions within an organization. Today, as the business world is transforming and getting dependent on new concepts and tools of technology, custom software development services have become an inclination and almost each big or small firm is looking to avail its benefits and services. As we know, each and every firm has different business functions and as a result of this each of them has its own requirements and in order to fulfill these tasks or needs they have to tailor-made product to execute in an efficient manner. This is where custom software development plays its important role.

As business is getting more competitive in today’s altering times, custom web development is emerging as one answer to offer tailor-made solutions and meet the specific needs of clients. Looking at the present scenario, the significance of customized software can not be ignored. To move ahead of the competitors in this outsourcing race, custom software development is gaining its popularity in various business fields. Currently, many business firms prefer to have custom software development as this not only helps in saving your money but time also.

Presently, reputed companies rely on cutting-edge technologies to provide solutions, for this, they need customized software to tailor their business needs. It is for this reason the emergence of this concept has brought in the importance and need for custom software development. Talking about some of major benefits of this concept, it offers solution according to the organizations needs and does not offer any functionality, which is not desired.

Custom developed software is encouraged to take under one hat the most progressive technologies along with preferences and expectations of the customer. Custom developed software may be designed in stage by stage processes, allowing all nuances and possible hidden dangers to be taken into account, including issues which were not mentioned in the specifications. Beside the experience of company in developing customized software, it is necessary to check their record of accomplishment in terms of functionality, management of the project, deadlines, and cost. These are some factors that help us in knowing about the proficiency of company in development of Custom Software Development in IT Sector

In this age of globalization, business processes are becoming more and more complex with various interlinked factors and parameters. It is evident that every business has its own opportunities and challenges. But if you delve deep into any business you will find that the basic underlying process is quite similar for all of them. SAP is one such ERP packages, which has not only helped many enterprises to transform but also helped them to achieve operational excellence.

The basic job of a SAP consultant is to implement Best Practices in enterprises from different verticals and add value to the bottom line of the businesses. The prime and most critical factor for determining how successful you will be as a SAP consultant is your understanding of business process. It is important for you to comprehend the business process in detail, and how each function is inter-related and integrated with the other. There are two types of consultants involved in any SAP implementation namely, Functional and Technical Consultants. The functional consultants interact closely with the clients to study and understand the business process, find out the criticality of the business, and collate requirements from the clients.

Most people who are working for SAP hold the title of SAP consultant. This is because it provides advice and high-tech services to big companies. If you want to be a SAP consultant, you should know the product very well. You can become a consultant in any number of fields, such as postal services, mining, oil, pharmaceuticals, transport, and education. The thing is to know about the product very well and the field you will work in. Being a consultant is not a simple job, you need to be well informed and up-to-date.

These consultants are under a lot of stress but the final satisfaction is huge. You must know how to deal with the clients, understand their needs and communicate with them. It is also related to social sciences. Consultants having good experience in SAP can give advice to the company regarding the services, which are in greater demand in the market. They may be in the best place to propose latest products to be developed by the company.

SAP security is indeed one of the best known fields because SAP comes together with any field in the activity. This is a rich corporation with lot of opportunities and more chances of personal development. All you need to know is what you want to have and be ambitious. You can build up on the knowledge that you have and also teach many new things. So working as a consultant or being a staff of its security is not an average job. It is the chance for you to prove your priceless qualities and develop your hidden personal skills.