This is not Six Sigma!

GE is probably the biggest believer in Six Sigma. Black belts everywhere.

GE is also Oracle's biggest customer. Larry recently bragged he sends in his President Safra Catz to negotiate with GE. May be Safra should be assigned to help emulate GE's qualityand process improvement culture.

John Stouffer, an Oracle DBA and consultant has been compiling and presenting on Oracle technology trends for a while. John is very active in the Oracle application user group and he had helped highlight the initial problems with 11i even as Oracle was pushing its customer base to move off 10.7. Click on image to enlarge and see the plots of his stats - and you can see bugs continue to gallop along in the tens of thousands.

I know Oracle's application suite is massive.  And this is not just about picking on Oracle. Look at MS Vista. Just about every software vendor seems to have a really bad release every few years.

The global IT services community spurred by Indian vendor commitment to CMM and Six Sigma (GE has driven that culture in its offshore ecosystem) has shown you can improve software quality year on year, release on release. The packaged software industry has miles to go to catch up in similar commitment. If GE can apply quality and continuous improvement principles to complex physical infrastructure projects and aircraft engines, so can the software industry. 

And no, it does not have to accept Six Sigma or any other regime. It can come up with its own if it so chooses. But it needs to commit executives like Safra to drive it.

Comments

[Aravind B]

Well I ll accept this line of argument when we see something as complex as Windows comes out of IT services company.They have hit an engineering challenges rather than process otimization challenges.

[viinnie mirchandani]

Fair point - and may be Vista is an outlier, but you cannot tell me the ISV community cannot optimize the thousands of releases it generates each year. Every process can be measured and improved. BTW - the first CMM Level 5 site was NASA. You think they have Vista like initiatives?

[Anonymous]

Vinnie

There is a thing in math called NP complete problem. Tradinal engineering solutions are finite solutions. Both IC design and Software design are NP complete problems.