Software Quality in Focus

In today’s world of technology, the citizens look for the best of services with convenience and intuitive response. Since the inception of the Digital India initiative, digital empowerment of citizens, coupled with governance and infrastructure support has been the need of the hour. Citizen-centric delivery and operational efficiency are the key outcomes of any solution being developed. While services such as multi-lingual interface, seamless channel experience are making the lives of citizens simpler, improvements in the internal operations have led to better transparency and accountability.

The current IT landscape, augmented by social, mobile, analytics, cloud, and on‐the‐go services, is ushering a digital revolution; NIC has been its driving force taking it to every corner of the country. With the technology advancements and changing needs of the stakeholders, there has been a constant demand of bringing quality, concerning Enterprise Architecture, Project Management, Software Development & Testing.

Keeping in view, Quality Assurance (QA) has become more of a necessity, rather than a choice. The software development teams need to start considering quality as an implicit function of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC).

Having recognized these necessities, NIC has established a Software Quality Lab (SQLAB), with the vision – “To be the center for innovation, practice in Software Quality and support project teams to deliver high-quality e-Governance solutions.”

With the central idea of – CONCEPT to COMMISSION, the SQLAB strives to create an environment of innovation and collaboration by bringing the right talent and skill set. It creates quality frameworks, toolkits, practices, and processes for benchmarking the applications against global standards and evaluate them against the quality metrics. Moreover, the success of any application depends on the holistic approach adopted by the organization that includes activities ranging from project feasibility, enterprise architecture, software development and finally going live.

SQLAB provides an ecosystem to software application teams by offering consultancy, creating artifacts for software project management, software design and architecture, UI & UX Design, Development & Testing modalities, DevOps & Agile software methodologies, and Quality Audit.

With focused initiatives in these areas, SQLAB has been a success in providing quality applications to a larger segment of stakeholders. For instance, SQLAB has published various documents in the domains of Quality Assurance, Software Productization, Scalable Web Applications to name a few.

The following initiatives have also been undertaken by the SQLAB:

● 20+ quality audits against Quality Assurance Checklist for e-Governance applications
● Workshops for Quality leads and Technical officers
● 40+ webinars including 3 webinar series with participation from Quality Leads
● 49 Quality Marathon mails been shared till date
● Software Quality Shots (SQUASH) messages in GIMS Quality leads group

By all counts and with proven results, it is no wonder that with the rise in ecosystem integration and strategies, the organizations need to have quality as their top priority for software development, better user experience, and operational excellence.