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Wed,
Aug 15, 2001 |
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TOP ISSUES E-business
Bookstore
CIO Canada
ITX Awards
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Officials with a new
government-sponsored software test lab in Montreal are throwing out the
welcome mat for Canadian companies, a move one expert says couldn’t come at a
better time. Billed as the first facility of
its kind in Canada, and the only French-language test centre in North
America, the new $7 million Software Test Centre (STC) is staffed and
operated by the Centre de Recherche Informatique de Montreal (CRIM), a
non-profit research and development agency that promotes IT in Canada, with
an emphasis on Quebec. The Centre was made possible by a
$2 million grant from Quebec’s Ministère de la Recherche, de la Science et de
la Technologie, with an additional $1.5 million in funding from the federal
government. The centre, which employs 16
full-time staff members, will help vendors and buyers run quality checks on
their applications and assist in the development of new software. Not only will this save clients
precious time and resources, but it also gives nervous investors some
assurance that the companies they’re funding are producing marketable
software, said Christian Martin, the Centre’s Montreal-based (STC) director.
And for now, at least, the service is free. CRIM quotes one study which found
that nearly $14 billion will be lost in Canada this year as a result of buggy
software. That’s why Martin is optimistic the Centre can help strengthen the
country’s technology industry. "[The STC] is wide open to
all software companies in Canada," he added. "Small companies don’t
have sufficient resources to work on process improvement in the long term…and
sometimes large companies don’t have the time to test all the characteristics
they’d like to test, and there is the pressure to make time to market shorter
and shorter." All too familiar with these
pressures is Denis Roy, president of Yortar Technologies Inc., a
Montreal-based firm that specializes in software development procedures. Roy
also sits on the STC’s advisory council, which is comprised of small and
large business people, non-profit organizations and government
representatives. "I believe [the STC] will be
a great thing for the industry," Roy said. "It could really help
develop and open new markets by developing confidence in a product." Roy said start-up software
vendors in particular need to conduct thorough testing. But the high costs
and considerable time associated with testing, combined with a lack of
trained testers in Canada, makes the task a daunting one. Roy said he knows
of companies that were denied contracts because of nagging questions around
reliability — a situation he hopes the STC can help avoid. Stephen Ibaraki, an IT veteran
and senior faculty manger of several computing programs at Capilano College
in North Vancouver, has noticed an emerging school of thought among software
vendors that places quality over time to market. He cites Microsoft Corp.’s
much-delayed release of Windows 2000 — which comes at considerable financial
and image-related risk to the company — as proof of how serious mainstream
vendors are about quality assurance. That’s because users are fed up
with buggy and hard to use software, and are thus likely to have little
sympathy for vendors that can’t afford to run quality checks, Ibaraki said. "For smaller companies, if
they don’t have some sort of a quality assurance program, then they’re going
to have a harder time. Consumers, companies and consultants won’t accept it
(if they don’t). "If the smaller vendors
could go to a third party company to do the testing, that would be great — an
ideal solution, perhaps." |
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©2001 ITworldcanada.com All rights reserved. |
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