Technistic News & Research

In the current economic climate, many service providers will be looking closely at their IT spend. With the Communications Index down more than 40% on where it was 12 months ago, should service providers cut back on operational support systems (OSS) and projects to automate service management? We think this is the ideal time to embark on these projects. With an economic downturn across all industries, there is an opportunity to access IT resources and personnel at a discounted rate. This provides an opportunity to take on projects that will deliver real cost savings. If you prepared a business case that didn't stack up 3 months ago, maybe it is time to revisit it. The rule as always though, is to keep projects short and focused. Deliver in small increments with quantifiable benefits at each stage and you should find you have leapt ahead of your competitors in 12 months time.

Last week a colleague asked about software quality metrics for Operational Support System (OSS) projects. A large telecommunications provider was complaining that the system that they had delivered contained too many bugs. The question that she needed answered was "How many bugs is too many?" . In answer to this question she wanted some benchmarks for industry best practice in terms of bugs per lines of code (LOC). Before examining this question, we thought we should look at some of the characteristics of OSS projects, including: Typically they are large in terms of code base and time to deliver; They are complex ; They are highly customised ; They are expensive and; They deliver strategic benefits to the service provider. In situations such as these we start by looking at the customer's real concerns - there is usually an underlying problem that elicits the response "Your system contains too many bugs" . Here is a quick checklist: