Pursuing quality improvements: a cautionary note on software Japanization

Abstract

Software quality debates have recently shadowed those in organizational behaviour and participative management, drawing inspiration from Japanese concepts of work organization and highlighting the positive impact of Kaizen and related team-working initiatives on group ties and supportive managerial relations. This paper underscores the danger of following the gurus of Japanese management too closely, of reifying packaged ‘solutions’ to quality problems and of pursuing universal principles of human resource management in the software sphere as elsewhere. The human side of software development is presented in terms of complex patterns of social interaction-incorporating organizational politics, personal conflicts and collective antagonisms-which potentially exert a powerful constraining influence on software Japanization. The message drawn from this is that software professionals should avoid importing human resource techniques wholesale in the hope of securing automatic quality improvements, and that greater thought is required in evaluating theoretical and prescriptive material from areas outside traditional software engineering.