Software companies in India and abroad are looking at a marriage of traditional quality processes like CMM and ISO with the daily build process, something global software majors like Microsoft have been following for ages. STANLEY GLANCY takes a look at the scene unfolding in India.

MICROSOFT Windows NT consists of more than six million lines of code spread across 40,000 source files. Hundreds of software engineers spent thousands of hours writing this code but how many users every wonder about the mammoth complexities that a project of this size would have generated? The fact is that it takes a tremendous amount of discipline and effort to complete such a gargantuan task- even though there will be bugs even in the final product. What is it that Microsoft does right? "Microsoft religiously adheres to the practice of Daily Build and that is the secret," says Rajeev Agarwal, principal, MAQ Software.

Daily Build explained
Simply put, Daily Build is a process in which a software product is completely built everyday and then put through a series of tests to verify its basic operations. Elaborates Praveen Kankariya, president and CEO of Impetus Technologies, "A Daily Build is an automatic, daily and complete build of the entire source code, which is clubbed with a smoke test to verify the sanity of the build."

Daily build involves making the latest version of the product available to the client every day. The process calls for integrating the latest work done by the developers, testing the integrated version, fixing priority issues and making it available to the client by hosting it.

Other than Microsoft, many product companies in the west have been religiously following the Daily Build process to save on time, cut costs, minimize integration risks and improve software quality. Indian companies, which have followed generic process framework like SEI-CMM and ISO, have now begun to realize the advantages of Daily Build. Says Agarwal, "We are taking the practices learnt at Microsoft and moving them to the off shore model. We build the product everyday and host it on the server, which then goes through bug logs. This enables us to get a daily review on the status of the product".

Why Build daily?
Among the main reasons for companies adopting Daily Build are the minimising of integration risks and improvement in quality of the software product. For instance, in the case of a distributed software development environment (onsite and offshore going on simultaneously) the risk of integration is very high, thanks to diverse sets of people working on different requirements at different places. The problem arises at the time of integration of the various codes and the product does not work well. If the fault is discovered very late in the project cycle, then debugging would take that much longer, resulting in further delays and added costs. In extreme cases, projects have even been shelved because of incompatibility between various modules.

By building the product daily and smoke testing processes, developers can minimise such risks. If a build worked perfectly well one day but smokes the next, then some thing that was done in the interval has gone wrong. So it is a matter of correcting just one day's build than rebuilding an entire build.

Some companies follow a Weekly Build process. But, according to Agarwal, the problem is that if the build is broken one week then the organisation can go for several weeks before the next good build, resulting in a loss of all the benefits of frequent builds. Even Kankariya feels that the sooner an integration problem is resolved the less expensive it is to deal with. According to certain industry estimates, by following the Daily Build process companies can save anything between 30-40 percent of the cost. Even the deployment is much faster as an organisation can significantly cut down on the amount of time spent on development.

Reducing the risk posed by poor quality is another key advantage. Daily Build helps capture the defects in the coding phase itself and reduces burden in the testing phase. It also helps the development team focus on larger issues of testing than dealing with individual bugs. This adds more value to the overall software development process. Says Agarwal, "You bring the system to a known good state and then keep it there. You simply don't allow it to deteriorate to the point where time-consuming quality problems can occur."

Other than these primary benefits there are a few tertiary benefits as well. Iterations are done away with. It is generally difficult to get customers to articulate their requirements. So when you provide them with the product they will be able to pinpoint their requirements. Also, according to Raghunathan, it improves employee morale. Says he, "By following the Daily Build process, developers can see the project running everyday, which serves to be a major morale booster."

How it compares ?
According to K. Raghunathan, vice president-technology for Blue Star Infotech, Daily Build becomes relevant in two contexts - the Microsoft context wherein companies run very large projects to develop products, and secondly in the context of extreme programming (XP), wherein versions are released everyday." Typically, Indian companies do not get projects on the same scale as those undertaken by Microsoft. Traditionally, Indian firms have followed CMM or ISO processes. But companies that are into product development and others like Blue Star that have adopted XP are major proponents of Daily Build. This is mainly because XP and CMM cannot be reconciled.

While SEI-CMM suggests incremental process maturity built across 18 key process areas covering aspects related to software engineering, software management and organizational improvement activities, the ISO quality management system is based on the Deming cycle of plan, do, check and analyse and helps in putting a customer focused organisation-wide process framework, aiming at satisfaction of all stakeholders.

Says Agarwal, "Companies that follow the CMM process need to necessarily document every single process. They also need to get prior approval on every single document before even a minor change can be incorporated. This slows down the process, which in turn leads to customer dissatisfaction."

But both Raghunathan and Kankariya feel that software developers can achieve a fine blend of both SEI-CMM and Daily Build. Impetus, for example, uses SEI-CMM and ISO 9000 for an organization-wide quality management system covering all aspects of software engineering, software management and organisational activities. This integrated process framework helps the firm to incubate knowledge integration exercises and also incorporate best practices like the Daily Build process. "ISO and CMM are strategic and philosophical, whereas Daily Build is tactical and a tool used for implementation and operational aspects. In that sense, the two complement each other and provide a complete and comprehensive guideline for the development process," articulates Kankariya. Daily Build encourages a certain discipline and helps developers stick to original deadlines as it measures progress on a daily basis. Even Microsoft follows processes like documentation, as it proves doubly beneficial to marry CMM and Daily Build.

Daily Success
Adoption of the Daily Build process is not without its challenges. Things can get hectic, as the pace is much tougher. The process has to be extremely streamlined, though this can actually do a lot of good in the long run. Penalties need to be put in place for breaking the build, otherwise the point of the exercise can stand defeated. For instance, all other works need to come to a halt till a broken build is fixed. Even when schedule pressures intensify, companies need to stick resolutely to the process, as developers are bound to take design and implementation shortcuts when stress levels increase. In the case of Windows NT a complete build would take as much as 19 hours, but the team managed to build everyday. In fact, the NT team attributes much of its success on that huge project to their daily builds.

But certainly, more and more organizations in India are adopting the Daily Build process of software development. With ex-Microsoft employees like Agarwal moving these processes offshore and making a success of it, others are soon likely to emulate their example. Companies have realised the time and cost advantage of the process. Even clients are beginning to demand that developers provide them with a daily version of the solution being developed. Most major companies in India already have a Daily Build component as part of their process and we should soon see the others joining the bandwagon. As Raghunathan says, "Today, advocacy of Daily Build is just a trickle but we should soon see it turning into a torrent.

The other roads to quality
SEI-CMM describes the principles and practices that can help software organisations improve the maturity of their software processes. CMM identifies key process areas and the practices that comprise a disciplined software process. It provides a layered framework to achieve the discipline needed to engage in continuous improvement.

ISO (International Organization Standardization) is concerned with formulations of technical standards to make development, manufacturing and supply of products and services more efficient, safer and cleaner. ISO 9000 standards aim to guarantee the effectiveness and efficiency of the organization its processes and customer focus.

Praveen Kankariya feels that the sooner an integration problem is resolved the less expensive it is to deal with, and Daily Build helps in this aspect.