If U. S. software companies don’t pay more attention to quality, they could kiss their business good-bye. Both India and Brazil

admin2008-11-29  20

问题       If U. S. software companies don’t pay more attention to quality, they could kiss their business good-bye. Both India and Brazil are developing a world-class software industry. Their weapon is quality and one of their jobs is to attract the top U. S. quality specialists whose voices are not listened to in their country.
      Already, of the world’s 12 software houses that have earned the highest rating in the world, seven are in India. That’s largely because they have used new methodologies (方法论) rejected by American software specialists. For example, for decades, quality specialists, W. Edwards Deming and J. M. Juran had urged U. S. software companies to change their attitudes to quality. But their quality call mainly fell on deaf ears in the U. S., but not in Japan. By the 1970s and 1980s, Japan was grabbing market share with better, cheaper products. They used Deming’s and Juran’s ideas to bring down the cost of good quality to as little as 5% of total production costs. In U. S. factories, the cost of quality then was 10 times as high: 50%. In software, it still is.
      Watts S. Humphrey spent 27 years at IBM heading up software production and then quality assurance. But his advice was seldom paid attention to. He retired from IBM in 1986. In 1987, he worked out a system for assessing (评估) and improving software quality. It has proved its value time and again. For example, in 1990 the cost of quality at Raytheon Electronics Systems was almost 60% of total software production costs. It fell to 15% in 1996 and has since further dropped to below 10%. So, like Deming and Juran, Humphrey seems to be winning more praises overseas than at home.
     Let’s hope that U.S. lead in software will not be eaten up by its quality problems.  
Which of the following is true about the cost of software quality?

选项 A、It is higher in U. S. than in Japan.
B、It is higher in Japan than in India.
C、It is higher in India than in Brazil.
D、It is higher in Brazil than in U. S.

答案A

解析 文章第二段说,“他们采纳了Deming和Juran的建议,将优质的成本在总的生产成本中降低到了5%。而在当时的美国工厂里,优质的成本是日本的十倍,即50%。在软件行业,情况依然如此。”说明在美国软件质量的成本在总的生产成本中占的比例比在日本高。
转载请注明原文地址:https://jikaoti.com/ti/ouhMFFFM
0

最新回复(0)