The institute is also putting in place an affiliation programme through which corporates can get affiliated to the institute for a fee. The would help the institute raise funds for its activities and corporates can benefit as the technical talent in the country would be trained in the latest quality procedures. This would lead to lower quality training costs for corporates and the lead time between induction and performance of a new professional can be cut short considerably, Mr Seshagiri adds.

The outfit has plans to train as many as 400 faculty of engineering colleges who would in turn train the students. Initially, the institutes activities would be in Tamil Nadu and then spread to other parts of India. Mr Seshagiri is optimistic about the support from corporates and he is in discussions with about ten corporates for the affiliation programme. "In a year, we will talk about the progress in the affiliation programme", he adds. The institute was founded as a tribute and acknowledgement to Mr Watts S Humphrey's pioneering contribution to software quality. Mr Watts S Humphrey founded the Software Process Program of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a Fellow of the Institute and is a research scientist. From 1959 to 1986 he was associated with IBM Corporation where he was director of programming quality and process.