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ABSTRACT
This work examined the challenges faced by software engineers in Nigerian by
implementing software regimes in their automation/computerization projects. The
study argued that Software Engineer Nigeria have had a long history of attempts at
automating/computerizing their operations, but most have not made appreciable
efforts. The major problem has been that of selecting the appropriate software to
drive these projects. The specific objectives of this study include: to identify the
types of software available in these libraries, to identify the extent of use of the
available software, to identify the problems associated with software use in these
libraries and to suggest the strategies for sustaining software use in libraries. The
descriptive survey research method was adopted for this study. The population
consisted of the federal university libraries in the southwest geopolitical zone of
Nigeria. The result showed that there was no uniformity in the type of software
used in these libraries. Also it was found out that the libraries have each used
more than one software in their automation projects. The challenges these
libraries have had to overcome to implement a sustainable software regime
include, lack of proper planning and evaluation of software before acquisition to
lack of knowledge of how to evaluate the software. To overcome the challenges the
following strategies were suggested. Study and evaluation of the software before
purchase, regular seminar/workshops on software maintenance and collaborating
with ICT experts and bodies to identify quality software. A number of
recommendations were made to remedy the situation.
INTRODUCTION
In every nation, the importance of computer software industry in the development of the
nation cannot be overemphasized. The fact that 70% of world’s programmers are below
35 years shows that the youth are very important in this industry.
The growth of the software industry in Nigeria has not been impressive owing to
numerous hindrances facing our youths in the industry; the most prevalent of these
problems is the non-availability of power. This has been a major drawback for the growth
of the industry; because power failure causes loss of work, corruption of data, delay in
delivery and rise in cost of production due to the additional fuel expense.
Another problem is lack of software development exposition. This has been one of the
major sources of motivation in foreign countries, as youths spend leisure time developing
and preparing for this expos as it serves as a medium to get known and to familiarize
oneself with the available companies in the industry especially the local ones.
Another serious problem is the lack of believe in locally made software. Government and
IT companies have not done much to show they believe in the ability of their citizens. For
Instance the Chinese government hires local citizens to build alternative to expensive
unaffordable software systems, aiming to produce a cheaper one for its citizens. This
raises the morale of the youths who are in the industry or aspiring to join the industry as
they are certain there is an available job and market for them.
These and many more are some of the numerous problems hindering development of the
software industry in the country.
THE TREND OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IN NIGERIA
Despite the emerging trends in the Mobile ecosystem in Africa, the reality is that
many African mobile entrepreneurs mainly the young Africans are yet to benefit
from the growing opportunities around them largely to the fact that there is little or
no structured system to support tech entrepreneurship in Africa.
Looking at Nigeria for example that has over 100 million connected lines, with
projections to sale over 35 million mobile devices this year with a 3G growth put at
12% and then the overall GDP growing at 7%, mobile web growing at a very fast
rate in Nigeria as seen in the increase in number of Nigerian users on mobile social
networks like WhatsApp, 2go, Eskimi.
With all of these interesting statistics, there isn’t much to show for as benefits
around these figures because we are mainly consumers of technologies and not
realizing that in the mobile ecosystem the big players are always the original
equipment manufacturers (OEMs), the Mobile network operators (MNOs), Mobile
platforms and then the app and content developers. We have seen the MNOs and
the OEMs making huge money from the Nigerian mobile market, the question is
how many Nigerian companies are among these MNOs or the OEMs? How many
Nigerian Apps are globally recognized? These are salient questions that should
inform our decisions today as a country as to determine our future relevance.
One is easily drawn to several distractions signifying the enormous challenges of
Technology development in Nigeria and why things can’t work here. Of course the
nascent app development community in Nigeria is just a part of the overall
Technology Entrepreneurship Ecosystem in Nigeria faced with several limitations.
My recent visit to the tech hubs in Nigeria has prompted this piece at this time
basically from my own perspective. Just the way I see things. The app
development scenario in Nigeria is like a rat race where nearly every young person
you see in the Tech space in Nigeria is a mobile app developer and a startup
founder. This is indeed a welcomed development but what I see on ground right
now goes beyond that. I have met with several young developers most of them
have really good mobile applications that are set to solve real issues in Nigeria like
location based apps, traffic focused apps, eduApps, mHealth apps but they are
always stuck after development of the app. How to move to the next level of
making the app known and then becoming a profitable venture is a hard nut yet to
be cracked.
Not every app will be profitable agreed. But every good app that solves problems
in the society should be a rewarding business for the developer as seen in other
countries like Israel, the US, UK etc.
Off course the question on the lips of most app developers I met is: when and how
can I make money with my app? How long is the journey, and how close is such
reality for Nigeria App developers?
The first principle is that app developers should have apps that are relevant and can
solve problems for the people and then more people use the service. It is very
important for app developers to see what they are doing as running a business
where all the qualities, strategies to make a business succeed are applied. That
mindset in itself leads to focus. I see a very wide skill gap in this area, young
developers need mentorship and business advisory services at this stage to help
shape their ideas toward a business venture, this is where incubators, accelerators
have roles to play in the system.
In addition to other perennial challenges of entrepreneurship in Nigeria (which are
lack of accessible capital, Funds and investors for startups, poor infrastructure in
the country, lack of legislation and policies that encourage entrepreneurship) that
app developers in Nigeria face comes piracy, copyrights, lack of software
development guidelines and issues around Intellectual Property (IP). This is a
major challenge. Many app developers have complained about situations where
their products are being exploited by individuals and organizations that have the
financial strength and the enabling environment all in the guise of helping them or
supporting the app developer community. There have been situations where the
ideas of these young app developers are stolen as a result of pitching the idea to
people or organizations they believe can support them, it’s sad, unhealthy and this
happens a lot here. These app developers go into negotiations with no legal
framework to support and protect their ideas.
THE CHALLENGES OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERS IN NIGERIA
1. THE PROBLEM OF SCALE:
A fundamental problem of software engineer is the problem of scale;
development of a very large system requires a very different set of methods
compared to developing a small system. In other words, the methods that are
used for developing small systems generally do not scale up to large
systems. A different set of methods has to be used for developing large
software. Any large project involves the use of technology and project
management.
For software projects, by technology we mean the methods, procedures, and
tools that are used. In small projects, informal methods for development and
management can be used. However, for large projects, both have to be much
more formal.
While dealing with a small software project, the technology requirement is
low and the project management requirement is also low. However, when
the scale changes to large systems, to solve such problems properly, it is
essential that we move in both directions-the methods used for development
need to be more formal, and the project management for the development
project also needs to be more formal.
2. COST, SCHEDULE AND QUALITY:
The cost of developing a system is the cost of the resources used for the
system, which, in the case of software, are the manpower, hardware,
software, and the other support resources. Generally, the manpower
component is predominant, as software development is largely labor-
intensive and the cost of the computing systems is now quite low.
Hence, the cost of software project is measured in terms of person-months,
i.e. the cost is considered to be the total number of person-months spent in
the project. Schedule is an important factor in many projects. Business
trends are dictating that the time to market of a product should be reduced;
that is, the cycle time from concept to delivery should be small. Any
business with such a requirement will also require that the cycle time for
building software needed by the business be small.
One of the major factors driving any production discipline is quality. We can
view quality of a software product as having three dimensions.
Product Operation
Product Transition
Product Revision
3. THE PROBLEM OF CONSISTENCY:
Though high quality, low cost and small cycle time are the primary
objectives of any project, for an organization there is another goal:
consistency. An organization involved in software development does not just
want low cost and high quality for a project, but it wants these consistently.
NIGERIA’S SOFTWARE INDUSTRY AND THE JOURNEY AHEAD
Indigenous software development has been described as one big area of
opportunity for Nigeria to bridge the technology gap. Experts say inadequate
infrastructure and dearth of active software engineering practices remain chief
hurdles to a timely achievement of this feat, DAYO OKETOLA writes.
In today‘s world of knowledge revolution, software is one of the biggest revenue
generating sectors globally.
However, it is sad to note that Nigeria has not appreciated the huge potential that
exists in the software market. The country has, therefore, continued to depend on
foreign softwares to drive the economy.
This situation, according to experts, does not only reduce innovation, but will also
increase the country’s technology dependency rate in the future.
They also say that software development industry is non-existent in the country
due to lack of infrastructure, dearth of indigenous software development and high
level piracy.
The need to find a lasting solution to the problem must have prompted the National
Information Technology Development Agency to conceive the idea, recently, of
establishing two software development centres in the country to provide training in
web design, software production, software engineering and software programming.
The Director-General of the agency, Prof. Cleopas Angaye, who said the northern
and southern parts of the country would get one centre each, was quoted as saying
software engineers from developed economies would be engaged to train Nigerians
in various areas to boost Information Technology utilisation industry in Nigeria.
He said, ”We have been discussing the issues of providing more software
personnel in the country because we believe that this is the only way Nigeria can
contribute meaningfully to this knowledge-based economy. We propose to set up
two centres in the country. With these, Nigeria can provide a lot of software
developers in the country and in the continent at large in the long run.”
In the same vein, the Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria has also called
for the establishment of a national software development policy and awareness, all
in the bid to address the seeming insurmountable challenges in the software
development sub-sector.
A United States-based Nigerian software engineer, Mr. Modibo Usman, who is the
Chief Software Architect, Schaide Incorporated, said Nigeria needed more than
what NITDA was already proposing to leapfrog the software revolution in the
country.
According to him, “The software industry is Nigeria‘s light at the end of a tunnel.
It offers us the greatest opportunity to catch on the technology gap. But we are not
doing much in this area and the window is closing. The average mid-level software
developer earns between $75,000 to $150,000/annum in the US. The US imports
over 100,000 software developers from India alone every year. On the average,
two out of every five developers are from India and four out of every five are from
Asia. There is a huge demand for software developers, yet only a handful of
Nigerians is into mainstream software development. In the Middle East, countries
like Dubai, UAE; Saudi Arabia pays up three times as much.”
Speaking on the problems facing the Nigerian software development sub-sector,
Usman noted that Nigeria’s learning institutions remained the number one culprit.
He said, “The problems I see start with exposure of our institutions of learning to
active software development practices. They are not as integrated with the rest of
the world as expected. If we have young software graduates coming out of school
without being able to deploy an average enterprise grade application; that does not
help the situation very much. Companies like Microsoft have outreach programmes
that collaborate with schools worldwide, which allows those schools to be part of
Microsoft‘s software research and development.
WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS FOR SOFTWARE ENGINEERS
“When these graduates come out of school, the real test of Software development
as a career goes into play. Where are the software companies? Software companies
that have a brand and products simply do not exist in Nigeria. I know because that
was why I left Nigeria. Even when I worked in Accenture, there was no software
development going on. The fact is you can only learn software development by
actually writing code. Your skill improves with the years as you build more and
more applications,” he added.
The Chief Executive Officer, Adapt Interactive, Mr. Muyiwa Aluko, who spoke in
the same vein, wondered if Nigerian youths, who could not practise and develop
their skills could be hired abroad or even hope to contribute to national
development by starting their own companies and going on to build software
solutions.
According to him, software development is underfunded in the country and the
industry is believed to be able to develop itself, somehow.
“Indigenous software companies are not guaranteed jobs, either by the Federal
Government or the large financial institutions. Rather they go to the West, or
countries like India to patronize their software companies. Some individuals
actually use foreign software companies as a front to do business. The harm all this
is causing will transcend generations and certainly help to undermine us a
sovereign nation, not to mention continue to hold us hostage to the technology
dependency cycle,” Usman warned.
Experts have also argued that emerging indigenous software companies are not
effectively being encouraged. They believe that the government must guarantee
their survival by charging them with the responsibility of either coming up with
their own solutions or demonstrating that they can develop or implement software
solutions proposed by the government.
Another problem in the software sub-sector, according to Usman, is that of
regulation. ”Almost everyone you meet claims to be a web developer, yet the
number or quality of utility applications that serve Nigerians are disheartening at
best. Software development is a national lifeline with quantifiable results that can
be verified on metrics,” he added.
The experts have also identified software piracy as a major hindrance to
development in the sub-sector.
For instance, Usman argued that software piracy had both moral and economic
dimensions, adding that very little could be done on the moral aspect because “it is
purely business for the perpetrators and only proper enforcement can reduce its
effect.”
He said, “The economic aspect is more dynamic, because it depends on a number
of other factors. First of all, software piracy exists everywhere even in the US, so
what is immediately evident is that the numbers climb by a factor of 65 per cent in
parts of the world where the standard of living is somewhat low. So the only thing
one can do with the economic dimension is raise the standard of living and so also
the level of economic empowerment of Nigerians.”
BASIC CONCEPT OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
The cognitive aspect of software engineering is sparse. The exiting investigations
stem mostly from cognitive science or Human computer interaction research and
deal with psychological theories on the nature of programming. Unfortunately, not
much of the available results have been used by software engineers to understand
their very own task or to improve their tools. Why is this case?
First, software engineering is often identified with the task of developing software.
However, this is only one side of the medal. Actually, software engineering is a
very general design task (Grenno and simon, 1988) and the existing result of these
tasks can be applied. Furthermore, software engineering is a very broad subject
that is made up from several, sometimes independent, activities that deal with
many different products besides the code of the respective software system. The
list of activities that occur with a software engineering task and that deal with
various (intermediate) products on different activities can be structured into
process models, it is necessary to understand these interdependencies on a
cognitive level.
Second, software engineering is often identified with developing software.
However, a major task of today’s software engineers is to comprehend either
software that was developed by other team member or existing, third party
software. This topic will become more and more important in the future because
software is used in almost any part of world and the effort to maintain this existing
software already exceeds the effort of develops new software (Balzert, 1998b)
p.34. Thus, it must be a goal to today’s software engineers to developed software
for future use.
Thirdly Basic Human Information Processing, The way in which human beings
handle data about their environment and the internal processes that are performed
during information processing are subject of research in cognitive psychology. The
model of cognitive processes that is assumed in this presentation is based on the
so-called single-store model of memory [sp ada, 1990]. This model views the
human memory as single, coherent structure that consists of a collection of
cognitive unit.
The single-store model distinguishes between two activation levels for each
cognitive unit. The units with a low level of activation are kept in the long-term
memory that is used as a passive, permanent knowledge store with a potentially
unlimited capacity. Every cognitive unit can enter the LTM, but no unit can leave
it afterwards. However, some cognitive units may become irretrievable in the
course of time which is commonly referred to as forgetting.
BUSINESS SOFTWARE ALLIANCE (BSA) IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
THE MARKET
The Business Software Alliance, an international association representing the
global software industry, in a recent study, said the Nigerian economy lost $156m
to software piracy in 2009, a $24m increase, compared to 2008.
The BSA, in partnership with a market research firm, IDC, said in the seventh
annual global software piracy study recently released, that the personal computer
software piracy rate in Nigeria was still high at 83 per cent.
Since the study was first published in 2005, IDC estimated that the commercial
value of software stolen over the past four years was approximately $584m.
Microsoft, in a statement made available to our correspondent recently, condemned
the use of pirated software in Nigeria, saying it remained among the highest in the
world and would not do the country‘s economy any good.
Although the use of unlicensed PC software dropped in nearly half of the 111
economies studied in 2009, the steady piracy rate in Nigeria remains among the
highest in the world, ranking 19 on the global list.
The Intellectual Property Manager, Microsoft Nigeria, Mr. Serge Ntamack, said,
“While we see some signs that the technology industry‘s intensified anti-piracy
education activities and enforcement actions in collaboration with local
governments and law enforcement agencies are making a difference, we have
watched software piracy rates for the industry as a whole in Nigeria remain
consistent over the past five years.”
The CO-Chair, BSA Middle East and Africa, Mr. Dale Waterman, who
corroborated the statistics, said, ”Due to the exponential growth of PC markets in
emerging economies like Nigeria, we are seeing the worldwide piracy rate rise
from 41 per cent in 2008 to 43 per cent in 2009,”
Ntamack noted that the rise in unlicensed software in Nigeria had limited local
technology innovation, job creation and economic growth, adding that it had
denied governments of vital tax revenues.
He said,”We know Nigeria has more to offer than pirated software.” according to
him, “We need to do more to protect the honest local businesses forced to cut jobs
because they are competing with pirated software priced at below-market levels.
Furthermore, we need to preserve the hard work and intellectual property local
software developers put in to technology.”
In addition to the impact on Nigeria‘s local economy, piracy has harmful
consequences for the consumer. Counterfeit software is often vulnerable to
computer viruses, malware and hackers, leaving consumers and businesses
unprotected against data loss or identity theft.
With the increasing sophistication in software pirates and cyber criminals,
Microsoft warned Nigerian consumers to avoid the threats to their privacy and
security when considering buying cheap counterfeit technology.
”As part of Microsoft‘s anti-piracy efforts, we will continue to work with industry
partners, the Nigerian government and law enforcement agencies, such as the
Nigeria Copyright Commission and the Economic and Financial Crimes
Commission to root out software pirates and fight for consumer protection on a
global scale,” Ntamack said.
Proffering solutions to some of the problems highlighted above, experts have
agreed that people must understand the place of software engineering in their lives;
not just as a utility with which daily lives become richer and fuller, but also as the
vessel through which people can meet and overcome problems.
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