Nottingham University Business School

MBA Programme in Singapore

Bytemobile Inc, United State:

Six Sigma in Software Development

Word count: 2564 words

Prepared by:
Ng Seow Sheng

Operation Management
Lecturer:
Professor Kulwant S Pawar
[22 November 2010]
 Content page

Content page---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------2
Introduction----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3
Company Profile----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3
Market----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------4
Business Strategy---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------5
Gap Model of Quality----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------6
Six Sigma for Bytemobile-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------8
Define-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 9

Measure----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------10

Analyze----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------10

Improve----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------10

Control-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------11

Conclusion----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------11
References:---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------12
Appendix A--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 15

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 Introduction
Six Sigma implementations had been very successful in large corporation such as
Motorola and GE. These successes prompted firms from different industries to look at the Six
Sigma framework and identify similar operation issues where could be addressed by introducing
Six Sigma. The idea of Six Sigma is to improve quality by reducing the number of defects to 3.4
parts per million. In software development environment, it is possible to manage the
performance of software processes. By using statistic tools, measurement such as time, size and
defects could be collected and tabulated. Such metrics help in managing and controlling the
performance of software processes. This report will look at a software base company from
United States on how to address quality issues by using gap model of quality to identify the gap
in quality and propose solution to implement Six Sigma for the day-to-day operation of the
company to improve software quality and reduce the number of defects by achieving 3.4 parts
per million.

Company Profile
Bytemobile Inc is a startup company that was founded by Dr. Constantine
Polychronopoulos from Santa Clara University California in 2000.It is a small company with
global reach. Currently, employed over 200 employees worldwide, it has a very strong presence
in EMEA and United States. Dr. Constantine Polychronopoulos, now holding the position of
CTO, has been actively involved in new technology and patents. The revenue reported on Inc.
for 2006 was USD20.9 million (Inc. 2007).
Bytemobile focus on delivering data reduction and optimization over the air interface
between a mobile device and the radio station. The value proposition of such solution is to
enable operator to achieve maximum average revenue per user (ARPU) with existing wireless
network infrastructure. Internet surfing with mobile devices becoming more popular as more
smartphones appear in the market, thanks to Apple Iphone there is a huge explosion of data
usage over the radio network that could create huge congestion as radio network has limited
bandwidth. Therefore, Bytemobile’s product is able to optimize the usage of radio network by
identifying wastage, example data that is not required by the browser on the mobile device,

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removing such data wastage and send minimum data over the air to the mobile device with little
degradation of user experience.

Market
Bytemobile has been dominant in mobile data optimization space since market’s
inception. The target customers are normally mobile operators with 3G licenses and experiencing
huge data explosion due to the growing number of Apple Iphone users. It was projected by
Cisco, 2009 that data traffic will double year by year.
B/

nt
M
T

2,500,000
Worldwide Mobile Data
Traffic Growth
2,000,000 64% in 2013
(73% in W.
Europe)
1,500,000
Data
P2P
1,000,000 Video
45 % of Audio
Traffic Today
500,000

0
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

Source: Cisco, 2009

With such data growth over the wireless network, mobile operators are becoming nervous
and some already experiencing congestion in the wireless network as the number of smartphone
users grow. As video traffic grows and contributes a greater proportion of the traffic mix, it
becomes more important for operators to manage it. Video traffic is expected to growth at about
150% a year and will soon dominate mobile networks. It is critical for operators to manage this
growth to control costs and maintain service levels.

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 Business Strategy
The current business strategy is to help operators to identify network congestion problem
in the radio network and propose web optimization as the value proposition. This is a very
convincing proposition as the operators are facing network congestion over the air interface
before the solution could be proposed. Solution sold to the operators is based on the number of
concurrent users at anytime. Bytemobile will help operators to source for hardware and install
the software for the operators. Professional Services is provided at additional costs to the
operators on top of what operators already paid the hardware and the software licenses. The
value proposition is to create a one-stop-shop to the operators where solution architecture
provided by Sales, installation, implementation and integration provided by Professional
Services and finally Customer Support could maintain and monitor both the hardware and
software aspect of the solution.
Operation from Sales, Professional Services and Customer Support are based on
concurrent users based pricing. Account team will approach the customers by offering solution
based on licensing usage that is tied to concurrent users. Professional Services will install,
implement and integrate solution into customer’s network based on the number of concurrent
users sold to the customer. Finally, the response time of Customer Support for any issues raised
by customers depending on the number of concurrent users sold. In recent months, Bytemobile
experience huge amount of rework required by the Engineering team and Customer Support
department is extremely busy solving and troubleshooting problems related to software defects.
As such, there is a need to identify where the problem lies; Gap Model of Quality is a useful tool
for this purpose. The following section will look into the Gap Model of Quality and try to
identify potential Gap between customer’s expectation and perception.

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 Gap Model of Quality
The Gap Model of Quality introduces the perception and expectation gap that could be
used to identify product or service quality issues faced by firms. In this section, the gap
experience by Bytemobile will be identified by analyzing current practices against customer’s
perception and expectation.

Source: From Prof K.S. Pawar lecture notes

According to Gap Model of quality (Berry, Parasuraman and Zeithaml, 1985) Gap 1
ensures consistency between internal quality specification and the expectation of customers. In
Bytemobile case, the solution offered by Bytemobile is based on licensing that count the number
of concurrent users. Unfortunately, most of the operators do not understand the licensing logic of
counting concurrent users instead throughput is the expected metric for measuring the traffic
bandwidth. Operators are more interested to know how much throughput the platform can
process, e.g. 400Mbps, as throughput is a common term used by the operators. These differences
in customer’s expectation and Bytemobile’s current operation created quality Gap 1. This the
responsibility of the marketing department, operation department and research and development

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department either to educate the customer to think concurrent users licensing model or to fulfill
customer’s expectation by creating licensing model based on throughput.
At the moment, the company suffers a great deal of software quality issues. Current
operation of R&D department experience high load and insufficient resources to address new
development and fixing bugs found in the software. Top management pushed for fast response
and first entry to the market as a result the quality assurance department did not have enough
time to test the software thoroughly before releasing the software to the operators. As a result
the quality expectation of the customers decline greatly.
The company vision and mission is to develop a software solution that is stable, scalable
and modular design. As a software solution company in a very competitive environment, the
company required to response to market forces that shift from one technology to the other within
months, the top management find it difficult to establish specification to response to technology
changes due to lack of trained developer. This lack of resources mean the company suffers
difficulty internal specification to meet intended concept of design as propose by Gap 2 of the
Gap model of quality.
Bytemobile setup a World Wide Customer Support unit to meet customer’s expectation
by providing service level that is compliant to operators’ requirement. Gap 3 of the Gap model of
quality specified that even if there is a specification exists, to meet the requirement of these
specifications might be difficult. In the same way, Bytemobile suffers consistent service quality
because human factors exist. The response time to customers’ requests are always varies
depending on the engineers on duty during that time. Some engineers were swift to respond and
others fall short in responding at the time specified. Therefore, the company suffers in meeting
the expectation of customers to receive consistent customer services.
Gap 4 describe promises made to customers concerning the product service can really be
delivered. Many times in technology products or services, the promises made by the sales staff
may not be met due to technology immaturity in the process or limitation of the technology. In
Bytemobile’s product, the same fate awaits them, many times, the sales staff promised that the
solution would be able to deliver 400Mbps of throughput but the fact is the product is not able to
limit the number of traffic by using throughput as the metric.
Clearly, Bytemobile need to address such gaps by looking into the need to improve
quality of its software solution and to eliminate wastage created by buggy software that requires

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rework. The solution for Bytemobile could be addressed by implementing Six Sigma for the
company. The following discussed the possible steps to improve quality by Six Sigma.

Six Sigma for Bytemobile

In view of current challenges to meet the gap discussed above, Bytemobile could
introduce Six Sigma to reduce wastage due to software development bugs. Six Sigma developed
by Motorola is meant to improve the quality of management. Six Sigma was successfully
adopted by General Electric in 1990s. Thawani (2004) noted that at least twenty-five percent of
Fortune 200 companies are very serious about Six Sigma implementation.
There are many Six Sigma initiatives failed to produce favorable result due to focusing
too much on the technical aspect of how-to rather than adopting Six Sigma as a corporate culture
that seek continuous improvement. Therefore, it is very crucial that the top management at
Bytemobile “embrace the following themes in its strategic vision in order to be successful; a
genuine focus on the customer, data and fact driven management, process focus, management
and improvement, proactive management, boundary-less collaboration and a drive for perfection
and yet a tolerance for failure”. (Chang 2007).
By adopting Six Sigma initiatives for software development the five stages will be
discussed define-measure-analyze-improve-control, DMAIC process. The R&D department has
been working double hard to fix bugs that were found in the field. Instead of being re-active to
quality, Six Sigma initiative introduces a more pro-active approach and continuous improvement
to the solution developed by Bytemobile.
As discussed previously, there are four issues observed in Bytemobile for each gap found
in the Gap Model of Quality. Only the problem observed in Gap 2 will be discussed and be
analyzed. Gap 2 suggests that the internal specification to meet the concept of design. As
observed the R&D department is suffering from many defects in the internal specification in the
form of bugs that failed to meet the intended concept of design. The following will discuss the
five stages for R&D department to adopt in order to improve software quality by reducing the
number of defects.

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Source http://www.sixsigmainstitute.com/leansigma/index_leansigma.shtml

Define
In this stage, it is important to define the customer’s requirement and identified the
current problem. Currently, there are a lot of complains from customers in relation to software
quality. Many customers upgraded to the latest releases and found out many problems such as
processes crashed. Some customers found out features found in previous release were no longer
available in current software release.
All these feedbacks are very helpful as this means that customer would like to have more
reliable software and maintain features that are found in current releases while adding new
features in the new software release.
The current tasks are to establish a project charter to define the goal of the project, recruit
members from different department to form a project team, plan the budget, schedule the
timeline and identify stakeholders.
Secondly, the customers need to be identified, external and internal. Requirements
gathering from these customers will be carried out at this stage, these requirements could include

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service requirement and features requirement. Sending out survey forms and interview key
customers to identify their requirement is the most important task.
It is possible to define to reduce the number of bugs reported by the field from the current
twenty-six bugs found in October 2010 to three bugs for December 2010. This would be the
target for the team to achieve.

Measure
Measurement is important as this would be a form of feedback to the team in order to
adjust the operation process accordingly. There is system in place, such as Customer Support
Portal that would send out survey after each support request log by the customer. From such
system, the number of defects, such as bugs and missing features could be tally. A quarterly
statistics could be generated and posted at the bulletin board to remind all the employees of the
number of bugs experience by customers. This could motivate each employee to strive to reduce
defects at each stage of the development process.

Analyze
The statistics collected at the measure stage could be analyzed in details to identify the
root cause. The defects found could be due to coding error, quality control issues or even
improper installation of the software on-site. At this stage, the data gathered could be used for
brainstorming purpose and a cause-and-effect diagram produced to help identify the root cause.
The list of all possible root cause could be generated at the end of the brainstorming
session. This exercise could be carried out quarterly to assess current situation.

Improve
The list of possible root cause identified during analysis stage would then be looked at
and possible improvement or solution could be drawn up. At this stage a test environment would
be used to experiment the proposed solution and repeat the measure and analyze stage to make
sure the solution suggested does reduce the number of defects.

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 Control
Finally, the solution found in improve stage would be deployed into the real environment.
It is important to maintain the improvement attained from the solution introduced. If such
improvement suffers undesirable results, the process will need to be re-evaluated.
It is very important to continuously improve on the current process and not to allow any
form of defects left unnoticed during the software development life cycle. With the defects on
each stage of the life cycle reduced or even eliminated, a more reliable and less buggy software
release would mean less complains from the customers.
Refer to Appendix A, Chang et al proposed fourteen questions that a manager could ask
at each stage of the DMAIC cycle to make sure that all required information are gathered and
evaluate properly.

Conclusion
Finally, the software quality issues faced by Bytemobile could be identified by using the
Gap Model. Firstly, some of the features found in the software do not meet customer’s
expectation. For example, customers understood the use of throughput to control the amount of
traffics passing through a system, whereas Bytemobile proposed Concurrent Users count which
is not understood by the customer. Secondly, the software quality misses the Gap of internal
specifications. Software was introduced to customer with many defects that did not meet the
internal specifications.
By introducing Six Sigma to the organization, issues with software defects could be
addressed by reducing the number of defects to 3.4 parts per million. The top management must
be convinced to implement continuous improvement program not just at the working level, but to
make it a corporate culture. At the moment, it is desirable to introduce Six Sigma program to the
R&D department in order to reduce the number of bugs found and to improve software quality.
There are three other problems identified using the Gap Model of Quality that could not
be discussed in this report. This will be an opportunity to further research into apply Six Sigma
to address those problems.

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Appendix A

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