SA gets software boost

By Candice Jones, ITWeb online telecoms editor

Johannesburg, 13 Mar 2008

The Joburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE) is confident the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) will fund an international pilot initiative.

The DTI will meet today with the JCSE and US-based Software Engineering Institute (SEI), following proposals submitted by the organisations to start a software development methodologies pilot.

"The minister [of trade and industry] has said he supports the idea, and the feedback from the DTI has been good," says JCSE director professor Barry Dwolatzky.

The SEI is based at a Pittsburgh university and has partnered with the JCSE on the capability maturity model integration (CMMI) project. CMMI defines the maturity of companies' processes and rates software processes on a scale of one to five. The scale measures the effectiveness of companies' ability to integrate new software and developers.

The DTI has already provided R1.5 million for the organisation's CMMI programme. During last year's CMMI symposium, trade and industry minister Mandisi Mpahlwa said: "We should see this as an opportunity to grow our own software development sector, which currently has an estimated value of R13 billion."

The new initiative is a combination of team software process and personal software process, which collaborate to measure the actual development process for better quality control.

The SEI intends to run pilot projects of this nature across the world and has chosen SA to be its second port of call. The pilot already runs in Mexico and, according to Dwolatzky, with great success.

"SEI representatives, Phil Miller and Jim Over, have recognised that SA has a far more serious and sophisticated software economy. We also have a similar situation to the Mexican software space and it makes sense to implement the pilot here."

Dwolatzky's only concern is the speed with which the government works. "We are very optimistic about the response from government; the only question is how long it will take for the funding to come through."