Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Can you differentiate corrective and preventive actions for process evaluation???

Evaluation of any process unforgettably includes the corrective and preventive action. Corrective action as the name suggest something you are correcting after you found existing nonconformity or defect, and preventing action is one that action taken to eliminate the cause of a possible nonconformity, defect or potential hole in the system.

Today majority companies follows a standardize procedure for software configuration management, e.g. ISO 9001:2000 for quality assurance. This procedure includes corrective and preventive actions and revises their process tracking system in order to improve the quality of their deliverable. Preventive action includes reviews, software validations and verification, quality management system review, and kind of more about statistical result driven actions. As process passed through particular obstacle, concern person review the cause of problem and provide their feed back in order to update your procedure and makes sure that the process will prevent reoccurrence in the future for the same kind of situation. For the corrective action, once you found the problem you will make some steps to correct your work done.

This same method is applicable to wide area of functional process, whether it’s manufacturing process, software development, or other routine procedures in different firms.

Reference: Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach, by Roger S Pressman

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Learn to say no

How easy do you find to say two characters word ‘NO’? It’s been four years, working in technology in Design and Development group. I was doing maintenance for developed software systems. There are different times, moments, situations where I find myself in very troubled situations. As new joined, just started, at that time, was very eager to learn and work on different things, always ready for all tasks. Project clients normally very demanding, that’s just nature of client/customer and as well as project lead much concerned about the task assigned to individuals. So normally you get no chance to saying “no” for the work assigned by people around. Later realized and experienced disappointment from their side and tired and frustrated from my side. Now days I will suggest to commit only the things you can handle, and if still you get requests, make it clear that this would mean not doing something else or everything, try to prioritize. This will make your life easier, organized and makes other to provide proper deadlines. The new work will cost the older one in terms of time, keep everyone updated. Be in a time constraint and always updated with a scheduled work, so you can give specific time estimation when task assigned to you. This allowed me to say no or you would say alternative mechanism to complete work in a nice way.