Page - 182 - in The Future of Software Quality Assurance

182 I. Trejos-Zelaya With regard to personal competencies, two project management professional associations, the International Project Management Association (IPMA) and the Project Management Institute (PMI), have developed competency models that include‘behavioural’, ‘people’or ‘personal’competencies: IPMAIndividualCom- petenceBaselineandPMIProjectManagerCompetencyDevelopmentFramework, respectively. Key traits identified: leadership (leading), relations & engagement, teamwork,managing,motivation,assertiveness, self-reflection&self-management, personal communication (communicating), relaxation, openness, creativity, cog- nitive ability, resourcefulness, results orientation, efficiency, effectiveness, con- sultation, negotiation, conflict & crisis, values appreciation, personal integrity & reliability, ethics,professionalism. 4 Industry For nearly 30 years, Computer Science programmes have sported 1 to 4 courses (typically 2) related to software development, sometimes including one or two ‘capstone’ project(s). A major problem faced by the industry worldwide is that university-leveldegreeprogrammesonsoftware engineering,as somethingdistinct from Computer Science or Information Systems, have appeared only recently (Rochester InstituteofTechnology’swas thefirst such in theUSA, in1996). Industryhas had to cope with the situation and invest in training their personnel beyondtheprogrammingskill-set that recentgraduatesbringwhenrecruited.Fresh graduates lack the subject knowledge and the discipline required for professional softwareengineering,butcan learnquickly. Latin America has not been a major worldwide player in the product-oriented software industry. Each country has developed its own software industry, serving localneeds,andsomecompanieshavebeensuccessful ingrowingsoftwareservices forexport.Aimingatstrengtheningtheirexportcapabilities, smallercountries,such as Costa Rica and Uruguay, reached the Inter-American Development for funding improvementsof their softwarecompanies’productivityandquality,upgradingand updating university curricula, building institutional competencies, fostering inno- vation and entrepreneurial initiatives, in addition to expanding industry-academia collaboration. Software services comprise development, maintenance, migration, support and testing. Mexico’s Softtek (www.softtek.com) is the largest Latin American IT company. Softtek offers diverse technology and business transformation services, and is credited to inventing the nearshore concept—servingmainlyNorth America incompatibletimezones.SofttekadherestotheCapabilityMaturityModel(CMMi) and has achieved its level five. It also uses Six Sigma as a customer-focused and data-driven management method for problem resolution, business process excellenceandprocess improvement.Withinanextensiveserviceportfolio,Softtek offers QA and software testing services using their own software QA & validation methodology and quality assurance and validation maturity model. In QA and