The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Office ban on social networking sites not a bright idea: Mahalingam

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Feb 23, 2008
ePaper | Mobile/PDA Version

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Office ban on social networking sites not a bright idea: Mahalingam

Special Correspondent

Workshop on software testing held

— Photo: S.R. Raghunathan

In discussion: (From left) Ramesh Gopalswamy, IT consultant, S. Mahalingam, executive director and chief financial officer of Tata Consultancy Services and K. R. Jayakumar, CEO of Competency Center-Software Quality, at a workshop in Chennai on Friday.

CHENNAI: An office ban on accessing social networking sites may not always be a bright idea to ensure that the software workforce is focused on an assigned task, S. Mahalingam, executive director and chief financial officer of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) said on Friday.

In his key-note address at a workshop on software testing, Mr. Mahalingam said restricting access to these hugely popular and youth-oriented sites does not necessarily enable a supporting environment for innovative thinking or for sprouting ideas.

Addressing an audience of young IT workers, Mr. Mahalingam advocated an environment that enabled the creation of ideas and then working towards its alignment with the management’s vision.

The TCS CFO stressed the importance of “failure tolerance” in the advancement of a concept or idea. “Unless, you do that (tolerate failures) you are not going any further with an idea.”

To illustrate the importance of this attribute, he cited the example of Stanford University where the concept of “learning from failure” was encapsulated in the curriculum.

The workshop was jointly organised by Division II on Software and the Chennai chapters of the Computer Society of India and IEEE Computer Society.

Testing as a concept these days has gained greater emphasis and travelled some distance as a specialisation, Mr. Mahalingam said. In fact, it is estimated that testing now accounts for 20 to 40 per cent of software development projects.

According to him, one of the pressing concerns was the sometimes unacceptably high costs of testing software.

At the same time, foolproof testing could also keep down overall expenditure by serving the imperative of catching errors at an early stage. A common experience has been that about 40 per cent of defects are detected by end users, he said.

An International Certification Software Testing system was also launched on the occasion.

K. R. Jayakumar, CEO of the Chennai-based Competency Center-Software Quality (CCSQ), outlined the objectives of the ICST, which was designed by CCSQ.

Ramesh Gopalswamy, IT consultant and H. R. Mohan, chairman, division II, CSI, also spoke.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Tamil Nadu