Dr. Tanja Rueckert, Executive Vice President – Head of Quality Governance and Production (QGP) – SAP, and Nandagopal Prasad B, Head – Partner Qualification & Certification, QGP, SAP Labs India, talked to Prashant L Rao about QGP’s role in ensuring software quality at SAP to the extent of stopping releases if customer feedback in the Ramp Up phase proved negative
What’s QGP’s mandate?
QGP’s mission is to be the quality advocate for both product quality and for our customers. We work with the customer before we release a product—we do beta versions, we do validations with customers etc.
Our mandate is to ensure product quality and customer advocacy. We achieve this by working with the development team early in the process. We have defined standards to verify an application’s function and correctness, its security, its performance, etc.
We say whether the product should be released or not. We have defined test cases along with the customer and they give us feedback on usability, performance etc. We always have a question at the end, ‘Would you release this product?’
There have been cases where we didn’t release a product because of customer feedback. We have a market introduction process called Ramp Up. BW powered by HANA was a Ramp Up driven by us. HANA is not just a database; we also have many applications built around it. We have to ensure that revisions to the product are stable and that the application environment works.
HANA has been a success. In the first half of 2012, we made $113 mn of revenue from HANA and we have over 450 customers for it.
Then there’s a program called Customer Connection where we take care of continuous improvement. Here we define a focus topic, CRM for example. Then we look for smaller things that can be improved in that topic and it goes out to the user group. We use a social media tool to let them vote and subscribe so that only the popular feature requests go into development.
We also qualify, certify and ensure compliance for partner products.
There are 700 employees in my organization across nine locations. India is the second largest department group. We have over 200 employees in QGP India. Our team is part of the co-CEO report area. It’s a neutral, independent department.
At what stage do you get involved in the development process?
We do the quality assurance piece in parallel with the development process. We put the software together, install it, test the DR, make it crash… We also audit the Ramp Up programs. Last year, we had project In Memory at QGP and the project lead was in India. We had a sandbox where all of our people could work on it. We took care of upskilling, organized customer visits and workshops and more.
Can you tell us about QGP’s role in acquisitions?
When it comes to acquisitions, often we would have already qualified the acquired solution as a partner product. Syclo’s a good example of that. Next, we want to sell it, so we would do the quality and compliance bit and go on site and discuss how they have done it before. Then we would undertake the first compliance check. Afterwards, we would go into our regular process for usability etc. We always learn from our acquisitions.
In the case of SuccessFactors, for instance, they have good processes for On Demand and Cloud computing. It’s QGP’s job to figure out how to put those features into our existing products.
100% bug free software is impossible. How close do you get?
Quality is key for SAP. We have 190,000 customers. We try for 100% defect free software but it’s not possible. We look at the mission critical points. We have priorities attached to our messages and we never release a product with a priority 1 or priority 2 message. All of the critical bugs have to be fixed. We have our standards that we check by, we have KPIs, we have culture and quality awareness programs.
We started from on premise and now we have to make adjustments for mobile platforms, the Cloud and the database. We have standards that are valid for all of our development locations worldwide.
How seriously is your group’s feedback taken?
The top management looks at feedback from the customers at the end of the Ramp Up phase. After we release the product, we go in a phase where we have controlled availability and we know which customers are going in and we work with each of them with a special service where we correct the messages. At the end of this process, we ask them what they think about the quality of the product, how they rate it, and after this customer validation, we ask them to rate the product. This external rating, mixed with one or two parameters like defects, forms our satisfaction survey. It’s quality from a customer perspective.
Security is a hot topic today. How do you tackle that?
We have a group focusing explicitly on product security that’s part of our CTO organization. We act as the second group for validating security as well as security patches. It is mandatory that every developer is trained on security. Still, we also have some security vulnerabilities and, therefore, we have a monthly security patch concept. We have major and minor security patches. Sometimes, it’s a challenge to get the customer to adopt it on time. From a customer perspective, we do internal regression testing before we release a patch. Major things might come immediately, while minor things could be packaged on a quarterly basis. We monitor patching closely. We also have a service offering where we do the patching. When we started the security program, we had the problem that customers weren’t patching but we are getting better as it’s very important for us.
Can you tell us about some of the work undertaken by QGP India?
HR policy management and EIM for India (address data cleansing especially for India) have been done here.
Prasad: Globalization for India and a few other countries is done by QGP India. We work closely with our global partners. Partner qualification (ISVs) for products that are to be SAP certified is done by us. That includes Endorsed Business Solutions and Solution Extensions, we validate partner products for these.
