Introduction of International Business Machines (IBM) (Company Background)

International Business Machines (IBM) is an American multinational Company. IBM deals in technology and corporate IT consulting. Company headquarters are in New York and Armonk. IBM mainly deals in manufacturing of Computer Hardware, Software and it is also involves in selling of these products. Moreover IBM also offers infrastructure hosting and consulting services in nanotechnology and handling mainframe computers. IBM founded in 1911 as Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation. It was a merger of 4 big companies. IBM was graded 18th biggest multinational company of USA in 2011 by Fortune. Globally, the company was ranked the 31st largest firm by Forbes. The company has more than 0.4 M employees, IBM has scientists, consultants, engineers, business personals and salesmen from more than 200 countries at its disposal who are engaged in multivariate tasks ranging from hardware to software development to provision of consulting services. The company has undergone several organizational changes since its beginning. IBM acquires SPSS, PwC, Spinning off and Lexmark companies in different years. IBM not only acquires other companies, but the company also sells some of its product lines like Lenovo and ThinkPad in order to make some organizational alterations.

Historical Background
In late 1800s technology was starting boost up and technologists develop diverse technologies. IBM starts manufacturing tabulating equipments to process unprecedented amounts of data first time. FORTAN was the first programming language, developed by the IBM in 1957, FORTAN mainly used for developing scientific programs. On April 7, 1964 IBM announced the first computer system family, the IBM Systems/360. This computer system family by IBM was designed to cover up the whole range of complex and complete applications. Those family systems were being used in commercial market as well as individually. In 2003, IBM instigates a program to re-establish the company rules and regulations. Lenovo buys IBMs personal computer business in 2005; moreover in 2009 IBM holds the SPSS incorporation. IBM starts

work on AI (Artificial Intelligence) and in 2011, IBM got the global attention. IBM develops the Artificial Intelligence program named Watson.

Problem (About the Case Study)

This case study deals with the technical problem faced by the Tivoli Development Labs. IBM is accountable for testing the software of Tivoli Development Labs before the release of the software developed by the Labs. Tivoli Development Labs develops enterprise-class software that supports numerous heterogeneous operating system platforms. As all the products of Tivoli Development Labs have to be tested extensively for all supported platform. Phil Buckellew, the program director of IBM Tivoli Development Labs explains the problem that We have to test every software product in a multiplicity of environments to mitigate the risk of problems for our customers, in 2004. In order to solve the problem the company have to re-established and reengendered the software testing process in order to minimize the software testing time, as it would helps the organization to launch the software in time. To do that, company launched and initiates the quality improvement program. The skills and the time required to test the software in each environment from bare metal to its full installation was the companys major problem. Company has more than 5,500 heterogeneous servers available in all labs in Austin, Texas. To meet the deadlines, sometimes extra resources were awarded to the testing teams. A typical operating system deployment required between 1.5 to 2.5 hours. Because the whole process was manual so the quality of work depends on how fast each tester followed the installation instructions. Moreover the Buckwllew said, Manually configuring test environments resulted in testing delays and an inefficient use of both our staff and our system resources. We needed to find a way to shrink the timeframe for testing so that our product groups could go to market faster with high quality software. That was the whole story about the case study. In order to sort out the problems and to achieve the goals, IBM took some steps, develops some processes and quality measures in order to improve the quality of Software Testing Process so that the company can minimize the Software release time to achieve deadlines.

Literature of Case Study

The steps, the company took to achieve its goals and to setup the quality measures for software testing process are below;

Automating Provisioning Processes Using Best Practices

This would assist testers to ensure consistency in the test milieu. This would also help testers render them capable to spend more and more time to test the software to ameliorate product quality. IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager software was being implemented to gain this particular goal and ambition. Tivoli Provisioning Manager software works with Automated Packages that provide the dynamic workflow. In this way the tester teams require to automatically drive provisioning operations based on best practices and procedures. This integration optimally enables the organization to install the gigantic number of operating system environments. The software provides the high security features to the organization, which needs to ensure the changes made by the authentic users in the servers and eventually foster goodwill of the organization.

Consistent, cost-effective software deployment

Tivoli Development Labs has automated more than 800 tasks that were earlier performed by the more than 400 machines manually via using and utilizing the particular software in an consistent and cost effective way. The whole process incorporates the allocation and removal of servers from the primary test places, configuring the servers; installing and uninstalling software and patches; and performing bare-metal builds. It has immensely aided the dynamic team to abate human errors. Errors were incorrect registry values, forgetting to remove an old file that may cause software conflict.

Savings to reach several million dollars

Lots of advantages and fringe benefits spring out of the use of the Tivoli Provisioning Manager software. In the process of use and expansion of use that particular software will ultimately bring the level of savings associated with maintaining the test infrastructure reach more than $2 million a year.

What is Quality?
Quality depends upon the choice of customer. A quality product or service is that which satisfies customer in every cost effective way meeting his/her the coveted demands.

Why is quality important?

Following are the reasons for the significance of the quality of the product or service: 1. Customers Satisfaction. 2. Customers Loyalty. 3. Expansion of Product Sale.

Implementing a quality system internal

Intermingled and interconnected parts of a group which make as a whole is a system. A quality system consists of parts designed to ensure quality. Quality Management System specifies the requirements of the organization to meet quality goals those are: 1. Product outflow in the market 2. Meet every legal requirement 3. Customers satisfaction. In order to apply QMS (Quality Management System) every organization wishes to achieve following requisites. 1. Comprehension of the standards and benchmarks 2. Usage of supporting literature and tools 3. Involvement of top management to devise Quality Plans 4. Trained quality managers

Implementing a quality system external

People outside the organization compose the External System of that respective organization. They include suppliers, outlets, markets and customers. These separate components are

assembled into a system as a whole. In order to achieve quality measures, organizations are bound to launch external quality plans and forge external linkages.

Conclusion of Case Study

By implementing and concerning the above tasks, IBM not only overpowered the problem of manual testing procedure and over time consumption but also developed an Automated Software Testing and Deployment System. Through this automated system IBM is now able to use all its hardware resources in an efficient way. The company has gained assorted automated processes to minimize the time, man power and cost factors. Now it is able to save a handsome amount of resources by implementing this automated software testing system. It eventually develops the quality schema for the organization by reconfiguring the problem. This development has eroded the barriers which hindered the quality achievements of the company internally and externally. It has strengthened and anchored the reputation of the company in IT landscape globally.