7 November 2007Posted to the web 7 November 2007
Peter AiluorioLagos
Nigeria Computer Society (NCS) and Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON) are to hold the fourth Software Developers' Summit tomorrow in Lagos, Thursday November 8, 2007.
The Summit titled: Indigenous Software Development Innovation for Growth is slated to hold at the Shell Hall, Muson Centre, Onikan, Lagos and will be chaired by former Vice Chancellor of University of Lagos, Prof. Oyewusi Ibidapo - Obe while Dr. Hamzat Obafemi, Commissioner for Science & Technology, Lagos State will be Special Guest of Honour.
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Sponsored by Microsoft, the event targets audience who are developers in software Houses; Developers in Private and Public Sectors; User Organisations & Consultants; Software Vendors/ Policy makers & investors, IT managers & service providers including academics and students.
It was further gathered that the Summit has also received the support of Nigeria Computer Society, NCS, and Computer Professionals Registration Council of Nigeria (CPN), among others.
Meanwhile, experts in the nation's information technology (IT) sector have canvassed public private partnership as a veritable strategy to boost indigenous software development in the country.
Mr. Emmanuel Onibere of the Computer Science Department, University of Benin , said that Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) refer to schemes of close collaboration between public authorities and the private sector to achieve specific goals by managing public and private resources.
According to him, "private public partnerships are popular as a means of building infrastructure all over the world. Private software development organisations need to engage in cooperative software development activities in the public sector to enhance productivity and increase IT usage for a broad audience including government employees, students and the general public".
The shared goal is to help remove barriers to digital inclusion and enable Nigerians to realise the full potentials of technology through the development of quality software systems that meet the needs of all sectors and across the various tiers of governments, he added.
He explained that achieving this implies dealing with issues that often go beyond the scope of individual actors. Consequently, the public and private sectors and civil society must cooperate, complementing each other's development resources. The activity of software development involves the application of principles similar to those used by engineers to build large structures to the development of complex software systems.
He averred that the complexity of the software development process requires that any form of partnership between the private and public sectors should be geared towards enhancing the whole concept of software engineering through problem definition and financing and production of quality software systems by carefully selected private partners.
He remarked that for rapid deployment of ICT, there is the need for PPP. This will enhance development both in the Public and Private sectors. The Computer Scientist recommended the Build-Operate-Maintain (BOM) and Build-Train-Maintain (BTM) for public organisations without ICT staff in the area of software development while Build-Train-Transfer is recommended for Public organisations having ICT staff with experts in software development.
Mr. Chris Uwaje, managing director, Connect Technologies Ltd., noted that the growth of indigenous software is predicated on the support and patronage from the public sector. He commended efforts by the Nigerian Information Technology Development Agency (Nitda) in this regard.
However, the federal government in collaboration with information technology (IT) professionals have begun moves to standardise indigenous software development in the country by instituting compulsory software testing for all locally developed software products.
Professor Cleophas Angaye, director general of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), who disclosed this at the e-Nigeria conference in Abuja, said that the government was partnering with certified software testing organisations to provide the testing.
According to Angaye, "Efforts to drive the patronise made-in-Nigeria software project had yielded little dividend because of issues of quality and lack of standard in a lot of the available indigenous software products". This is why the government started looking at alternative initiatives that would enable it garner the needed support for make the buy made-in-Nigeria software acceptable and successful, he added.
Hence, there is need to set up appropriate mechanism for quality assurance and global standard for testing and certification of softwares developed in Nigeria , he averred.
He said that the essence of the testing is to help indigenous software developers achieve products that meet international standard and thus become competitive globally. He noted that this sort of process is the reason why the softwares from India have been very successful on the international scene.
Angaye reiterated that with the required testing done, the product becomes certified by the agency with opportunity for patronage from government ministry and parastatals as and when due.
Akinwale Akingbade, managing consultant, TC-QA & ASSOCIATES said that software testing is a technical investigation done to expose Quality/Performance-related defects/bugs about the product /Application Deployed or to be deployed.
On why software testing is critical, he stated that it serves as a barrier to allowing low quality products reach the customers or users as it is a process of exercising or evaluating a system or system component by manual or automated means to verify that it satisfies specified requirements or to identify differences between expected and actual results.
The software testing enthusiast revealed that the goal of testing is a successful test effort which is to establish a responsive, dependable system in possible time that satisfies and delights the users while staying within budget and resources constraint.
gathered that the ICT event will play host to several resource persons which include country manager, Microsoft, Chineye Mba-Uzoukwu; Dapo Onawole of Microsoft Mup, Nigeria; Dr. John Ndanusa Akanya, OON, DG, SON; Francois Bonin - Microsoft MVP, Ghana; Attila Szenved - Microsoft, MECA and Wehab Sarumi - MD, Wadof Software.
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