Wipro factory ?
I have always made fun of the large software houses like Wipro, TCS, Infosys in Bangalore (in good jest). I have nothing against them. They are giving more than their fair share to the GDP of the nation, and I admire that. But I always make fun of them, by calling them code factories, where thousands of engineers write code-after-code, for offshore clients. I have heard inhumane conditions of work -- not physically, but conditions of work, where creativity is stymied, and routine work is admired, and gains you a promotion etc. In these factories, there are all but a few people who decide the specs, and what goes where, and the others code, code, and code ... Readers who work there, please do not take offense. I am not saying these are menial jobs. It requires expertise and good software engineering skills.
Anyways, coming to the point of the post, yesterday, in one of the Wipro buses, I found this slogan. I may be missing a few words here and there, but the gist went like this:
Wipro -- Innovation at its best ... etc etc ... We follow the factory model, resulting in 30% lesser defects and higher quality software products.
I was floored. Wow. They really follow some factory model ! Very interesting. And I went and looked up on wikipedia to see what the factory model is, and sure enough, there is something called the
software factory
.
And guess what, I even found the following paper in IEEE through google.
A Software Factory Model Based on ISO9000 and CMM for Chinese Small Organizations
Very interesting.