QMS – Manufacturing vs Software Construction

In software industry, organizations are trying to implement manufacturing QMS in software development. Especially Offshore/Outsource software development companies are keen in implementing manufacturing QMS.

Manufacturing is process dominated and Software is project dominated.

Similarities:
1. Both the industries exist to make products
2. Both the industries are part of the large business community, seeking to survive, and striving to make profit. Today, it is commonly accepted that profitability and survivability are driven by “customer satisfaction”

Differences:
Today, the quality function is a vital and well-developed discipline within most manufacturing organizations, having seen a great evolution over the last century, and continuing to improve today.

Quality functions in software development are as diverse as the software industry itself, which is commonly divided into small application, enterprise application. For most of the software development, quality requirements are established by several different stakeholders (product owner, standards defined by various organization (like W3C), end customer, architect/engineer and software product vendors like IBM, Microsoft, etc) but, the final arbiter is the product owner who must balance among the competing interests of a project’s price, time, quality, and scope.

Software Industry found generally inadequate use of “soft” quality measures, such as customer satisfaction reviews, quality teams, quality planning, etc., in evaluating project success.

Software industry has following issues
• There is inconsistent application of quality standards in the industry.
• There are no complete and accepted quality performance standards.
• Customer expectations are different from architect/developers expectations.
• Inspections/ reviews are inadequate for ensuring quality.