Real-time Release Readiness across Product Lines

By Ahmad Fatah, Customer Solutions Engineer, MKS Inc
In collaboration with Kurt Battick, Customer Solutions Engineer, MKS Inc

Do you have visibility into the release readiness of your products at any time in the lifecycle? Although seemingly obvious, the four areas that define product readiness are rarely considered holistically: Quality, Compliance, Functionality and Budget & Schedule. Product Release Readiness is vital - in order to forecast availability to customers, maintain customer confidence, meet tight, predicable product launch windows and provide quicker response time to issues as they arise.

The traditional approaches of milestone based development often lead to non continuous awareness along with the risk of filtered/massaged data. When this happens, the paradigm of component readiness (versus product) tends to creep in. From cradle to grave an SSLM, Software and System Lifecycle Management, based solution allows for full transparency at any point in the lifecycle of product development.

An SSLM solution provides real-time access to dynamically calculated data that allows for visibility into release readiness at any point of the lifecycle, not just at the milestones. The benefits of real time data are two-fold:

• Data is collected at the source of work automatically without impeding productivity


• Deviations are flagged immediately and corrective action can be taken in real-time

This translates into having access to a dynamic early warning system where full traceability produces objective and non-filtered data. Business logic can be defined based on the specific criteria and process. Individual project components no longer stand alone but can contribute to overall product status. Costs, schedules and quality measures all contribute to Product readiness. By utilizing and calculating metrics against real product deliverables, product metrics can be accessed instantly.

Product design & development today, requires a higher level of collaboration across all engineering disciplines, find out more...

Feel free to comment and let us know what metrics you have in place to determine product release readiness?

There IS an "I" in Team: Integration is the key to success in complex engineering systems

Software has effectively become the driving force of innovation in engineering and, in particular, provides the foundation of design in mechatronic systems. As these systems increase in complexity, the ability to effectively manage and communicate the business-critical elements of the software development process can broadly and deeply affect the success of the entire organization.

The movement towards model-based development (MBD) brings the software development process to the forefront. In MBD, the system model is developed in the initial conception phase of the product and provides a common link to other development artifacts that are dependent on its design. Model simulations are used to confirm, refine and validate requirements early in the product development lifecycle, when changes are easier to accommodate, and can be reused later in the software lifecycle to develop and verify acceptance criteria just prior to release. Faster design iterations and reduced design costs are realized by using MBD, expanding an organization's innovation capacity.

So why are organizations that have already adopted Model-Based Development processes, still facing significant challenges in the development of their software products?

As the pace of change increases and products continue to grow in complexity, the risks and costs of manual and disconnected processes between development teams can diminish the benefits of modeling and simulation, resulting in:

• Inconsistency in mapping the current design to the most current requirements


• Costly, error-prone and time-consuming manual communication of requirements change when it impacts models/simulations


• Difficult and time-consuming to perform root cause analysis on failed test cases


• Costly and time-consuming to demonstrate compliance with regulations and governance demands

Integration is the key to helping multi-disciplinary teams overcome the challenges that are prevalent in complex engineering systems. A system and software lifecycle management (SSLM) solution can capture, manage and control models and simulations as artifacts in a coherent system. The configuration of and change to these artifacts are effectively managed, and the relationships with upstream and downstream artifacts in the development lifecycle (requirements, test cases, specifications, source code etc.) can be established and are traceable.

Successfully integrating MBD with a SSLM solution makes the following activities possible:

1. Management visibility of progress at critical parts of the development cycle


2. Compliance validation at selected points in the process


3. Design verification at a much earlier stage of product development


4. Test developed system components using rapid prototyping and Hardware-in-the-loop techniques


5. Automatically generate and manage multiple iterations of code for deployment


6. Re-use of designs, configurations and parameter sets

Achieving a high level of control and collaboration over software development greatly increases an organization's ability to predict the final result of their activities. The only way to achieve this control and collaboration is through the use of a coherent System and Software Lifecycle Management solution, and fully integrating a Model-Based Development process with these solutions.

Please feel free to comment on whether you are considering adopting model-based development processes, and what challenges you are facing in doing so.