Leveraging Software Investment: Designing and Building Quality Software Products

Software investments represent a significant, if not dominant, proportion of the information technology cost within an oil and gas operating company. Technical software costs are particularly high because companies value specialized applications that have high development costs. Training and support for these applications drive up costs even more, especially if an application has not had rigorous quality control applied during its development process. Oil and gas operators then must dedicate additional internal resources for product support, which increases the product`s real cost even further. This paper shows the rigorous methods of quality control and assurance techniques involved in software development and testing and the benefits of these methods to the oil and gas technical applications` investor. The paper also illustrates how technical applications` support cost may be reduced by designing quality and stability into the software through the application of quality control techniques during the specification, design, implementation, documentation, and testing phases. Lastly, the authors discuss the metrics they used to measure the quality of the software`s performance.