KEY POINTS:
New Zealand software and technology can punch above its weight in world terms but there are areas where it falls down.
That's why Auckland University is leading research projects aimed at helping organisations here lift their game.
Extenda, which has been developed by the university's Centre for Software Innovation in partnership with Uniservices and the business school, is aimed at small and medium technology companies keen on building innovative software products.
"We are trying to raise a research culture in small and medium enterprises," says Professor John Hosking, of the department of computer science.
"It follows on from the CSI academy programme, which was aimed at fostering internships.
"This is about getting SMEs to lift their game in thinking about the underlying technologies they need, how that maps to market drivers and feature sets, and get them at the stage where they can do repeated innovation rather than one-off products."
A long-standing problem with New Zealand industry is that companies are developed around one or two products. The firms can struggle when the product's market life ends.
"They need to understand road maps, and leveraging and implementing research," Hosking says.
The centre is offering to put experts into companies to run workshops. A two-person team of graduates from the computer science and business schools will stay on as consultants, working with the company on how the lessons from the workshop can be incorporated into the business.
"An important element is offering a creative front end around a free-ranging discussion on what people want or use.
"One problem with IT is it is not seen enough as a creative discipline.
"In any other creative discipline, if you come up with less than five or 10 candidate designs, you get fired. In IT, we come up with one solution and back it, rather than offering alternatives."
Alongside Extenda is a year-long survey on software process and product improvement or SPPI, funded by a $3.4 million grant from the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology.
"The aim is to work with larger companies. We're looking to improve process, production efficiency and quality," Hosking says.
SPPI is led by the Centre for Software Innovation's co-director, Professor John Grundy.
"I think it's hitting a chord with the local industry," Grundy says.
"People realise that there is a lot of best practice out there. We could do with some help to perform better."
He says process and product improvement are part of wider problems around recruitment and retention of staff, which has become critical in the past couple of years as New Zealand industry has rediscovered its appetite for software and is looking for innovation.
"There are not enough staff to go round but if you up your productivity, if you use your team better, it can make it easier to retain people.
"Also, by using students, it is a good way to build relationships and battle-test them in industry settings."
Grundy says New Zealand has always had a high degree of creativity in its software development, but there is a difference between a customised hack and a fully fledged product.
"Stuff needs to be engineered in a way so it is scalable, it is maintainable, and people can get the most out of it.
"A lot of the industry started out with a good idea, got some capital and turned the idea into a single product it would tailor for individual customers.
"Down the road, they may get a big customer and get to the point where it doesn't scale, it is not maintainable.
"They discover they did not have a product but a set of tailored services."
That may be fine in some circumstances but products need engineering processes to support them.
Grundy says New Zealand continues to be a great place to develop software, because its size and the nature of its society makes it a great test bed.
"You look at a field like health informatics, where we can test it in a population of four million," he says.
That has worked well for companies like Orion and Jade Healthcare, who developed systems here before shipping them overseas.
"There are also interesting solutions coming out of the transport sector.
"Because of New Zealand's topology and the challenges of getting stuff around, this is a nice test bed."
He says new development techniques emphasise the use of models so, instead of knowledge being held at the code-cutting level, it is captured and managed at a higher level.
"Talking to companies, a lot of what they lack is the time and expertise to reflect on what they are doing, or the time to investigate new practices," Grundy says.
"We are offering to get new folk in to try new techniques and design tools that they don't have the time or expertise to try out."
Ian McCrae, of Orion Software, says the Centre for Software Innovation is on the right track.
"New Zealand companies typically have small development operations and, as those operations get bigger, it becomes harder to organise large teams of developers into efficient groups," McCrae says.
Orion now has more than 100 developers working to engineer its products for health systems in multiple countries round the world.
"During the past year, I've come to realise that the most critical thing for us is the way we organise those processes," he says. "There is not a lot of that expertise in this country."
* ON THE WEB:
www.csi.ac.nz
https://wiki.auckland.ac.nz/display/csisppi/
