White Paper
ALM for Innovation: Making Smart Products Smarter No matter what business you think you’re in, you’re in the software business. The truth of that statement is now decidedly evident for manufacturers. In 2011, Marc Andreessen declared that “software is eating the world.” Today, application-laden “smart” products are on the rise in every industry. An automobile’s infotainment system alone consists of over 100 million lines of code. A Boeing 787 Dreamliner requires 6.5 million lines just for avionics and onboard support systems. A pacemaker keeps a heart beating—and communication with doctors instantaneous—thanks to 80,000 lines of code. Even the software-driven smart appliance market is expected to grow at CAGR of 15.4 percent growth through 2020. This pairing of applications with physical products is impacting all makers of complex products as buyers look for a steady roll out of innovative, groundbreaking features. Software makes possible cars that parallel park themselves, security systems that can
be controlled from a smartphone, and farming machinery that optimizes fertilization, irrigation and pest control. Smart manufacturers are more closely aligning application lifecycle management (ALM) with product lifecycle management (PLM) to reduce the cost of code complexity— both literal resource expenditures of time and high-cost skills and the erosive competitive cost of lagging in innovation. These leaders are flipping application development and management from a burdensome challenge separately managed from the physical product to part of a new, holistic product development and management path that makes first-to-market product differentiation easier.
80%
of product innovation and differentiation is now electrical, electronic and software. Not mechanics. - Siegmar Haasis CIO of R&D at Daimler
The flip begins with changing how products are developed.
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The challenges of isolated and disconnected application development PLM integrates and streamlines product management from product inception, through engineering design and manufacture to service.
problems arise. Versions could be out of sync, requiring rework that pushes up costs and delays development and market release.
For software development, companies deploy ALM, which can be thought of as PLM for software. It’s a unified solution for requirements, coding, testing and release within a single system, and it encompasses application lifecycle from requirements, to SDLC, to release and maintenance.
These challenges are compounded by increased market expectations. Today’s customers want faster and more frequent product releases and updates. They want applications that deliver new functions and capabilities. They want more production variation, often customization. And they want ever-higher quality for physical and digital systems.
Integrating software and hardware development requires companies to rethink and retool their development processes. As software increasingly defines product value, its development becomes more critical. It needs to start earlier in product development and be integrated with the workflows of all product specialists—not just members of the software engineering team working on a single product’s applications. This is different from traditional development and requires more collaboration between and among domains to not only maintain rigorous quality standards, but also to enable incremental innovation over a product’s life. The problem is most manufacturing companies use unconnected and ad hoc tools for software development. They use different systems for each step of the process, such as QA, test case management and variant management, which leaves critical product-related artifacts scattered throughout different systems: on a file system, in somebody’s inbox, on a whiteboard in some room or on a napkin in somebody’s desk drawer. It’s a struggle to manually manage and trace these files and other data across functional boundaries when they live in unconnected systems. Other collaboration-killing barriers can be organizational. For example, each domain may work within its department, connecting with others only at certain checkpoints in the development process. As the domains begin to bring their solutions together,
Additionally, since systems and products have started relying on software, regulatory compliance has grown more complex as the products have grown more complex and are vulnerable to more in-field failures. A recent study found that software flaws were the cause of 24 percent of medical device recalls.
About 1 in 4
medical device recalls happen because of software flaws. It’s no longer sustainable to have multiple, disconnected development tools. What’s needed is technology that helps with coordination and collaboration among multiple teams, and visibility and traceability in product development and application development. When processes are connected and working in parallel, all product-related artifacts for both physical and digital systems are in one place and can be accessed with confidence that the data is up-to-date and accurate—from the beginning of the product lifecycle all the way to the end.
Cercacor Laboratories, Inc. understands the value of implementing an integrated ALM solution to unify their test and quality management initiatives. An innovator in health and athletic performance monitoring technologies, Cercacor provides noninvasive tracking technologies that are used by leading hospitals around the world. Cercacor needed to find a more efficient way to create and manage test cases and other quality assurance activities, as well as track adherence to United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards. The company was frustrated with paper-based systems, routing redundant documents and trying to determine where the most recent documents or spreadsheets were stored. Cercacor recognized that it needed to find the right tool to control document tracking and revisioning to extend its state-of-the-art expertise beyond hospital environments and into the athletic market. “We realized that we needed a central repository for access to the same documents without versioning and searching problems,” says Howard Chan, a test engineer at Cercacor. “We also wanted visibility into the testing process so everyone can see the same software requirements, comments and changes.” In seeking a solution, Cercacor chose Polarion’s unified ALM solution, which addressed quality assurance issues, created a central repository to reduce redundant processes and established process visibility. Cercaor also saw significant benefits in the development of more efficient methods for creating and managing test cases. “By using Polarion solutions, we reduced test plan creation time by as much as 75 percent,” Chan says. Going forward, Cercaror plans to employ Polarion to continually refine processes to align with their development methodology and discover better ways to manage the verification and validation process.
Twice the benefit: PLM and ALM working together Both PLM and ALM solutions help companies overcome a number of obstacles to deliver the innovative new products customers demand, chief among them: Collaboration. Modern ALM and PLM eliminate silos and facilitate collaboration by enabling people to work within a single solution, in the same environment, even as each discipline uses different tools within it. The systems allow team members to collaborate not just easily and seamlessly, but also securely. They grant the right level of access and visibility into the system for every person touching the development process, so everyone understands the “who, when what and why” for every change. This also means project team members can easily share internal information across development disciplines. For example, they are able to maintain threaded comments and discussions about individual requirements and test cases when something is changed, and can easily “round-trip” information with external stakeholders such as customers and suppliers. Workflow controls ensure that every part of the process is mapped correctly, guiding users, ensuring the process is followed and allowing managers to focus on the project, not the process. Workflow automation reduces manual work and prevents errors. During audits, users can open and search any moment—items or reports—and perform any query from any historical moment.
Traceability. ALM and PLM enable deep, granular end-to-end traceability, not simply links. They ensure the completeness of the information about every step in a development process for audit purposes. This includes: • Historical: Every change is tracked. • Process: Provides proof that the process was followed by linking the evidence and design specification and design task. • Verification: Though sometimes considered part of traceability, it provides evidence that the requirements, design and user stories were verified and validated. • Data: Allows users to navigate from higher level objects, such as business cases to epics, or user stories or work packages to user level tasks. Reuse. Research shows that projects rarely begin with a blank sheet of paper. As much as 60 to 80 percent of requirements, code and testing are shared between projects. ALM and PLM facilitate efficient reuse of regulatory standards across projects and products, including requirement and test specifications, source code and process descriptions. The best systems allow project teams to not only branch and merge code, but other data as well, including requirements and test cases. This allows for effective sequential or parallel project development. Product teams can innovate using
a platform approach, accelerating the development of new product variations—including customizations. By helping development teams work more efficiently and providing every stakeholder insights into the development process, companies cut lead times, reduce costs and become more competitive by introducing the latest innovations faster.
Extending ALM into PLM integrates software development orchestration with the mechanical and electrical domains, while tending to each domain’s unique needs in an interoperating system. With an overall orchestration of software and product development, and a unified approach to collaboration, traceability and reuse, project teams can better manage changes anywhere in the development cycle. For example, project teams routinely need to manage software changes caused by mechanical, electrical and electronics changes, which is particularly complex. With an integrated system, companies can drive the changes and impact analysis in a concurrent fashion across domains, delivering product quality, compatibility and engineering accountability. With a convergence of ALM and PLM processes, companies ensure software development is tightly integrated into not only the product, but also the product’s development.
Learn more about the five levels of ALM-PLM integration.
Toward a systems-driven product development approach Consider, for example, the automotive industry, where the inclusion of embedded software promises to transform the very definition of the industry. The software revolution has already expanded automotive applications toward non-traditional areas of consumer electronics and mobility. The Internet of Things penetration into the automotive space is picking up steam faster than expected, driving the integration needs of connected services and IT application development with vehicle embedded software. Even traditional mechanical systems such as parking brakes are becoming more electrified and software controlled, giving rise to more complex versioning over time as vehicles get older. Traditional service models are also adopting to the rapid software infusion and hardware reduction with software update strategies and network diagnostic tools, both of which solve problems, as well as gather information that offers opportunities to build new features and products. Predictions say half the cars on the road will have advanced driver assist systems by 2025, and that a child born today will have no need for a driver’s license, as autonomous vehicles with increased DAT and AI become commonplace. Such rapid change has automotive companies investing in multidomain integration strategies to manage the complexity and capture the ROI of software-enabled features, even as commercial pressures result in reduced margins. By integrating ALM and PLM, and employing advanced multidisciplinary techniques, automotive companies are moving away from a siloed development process to deliver designs that meet or exceed customer expectations, while ensuring that all downstream design implications are considered during the early stages of software development to meet challenging time to market demands.
Doing so will enable development teams to: • Manage the overall system design across software, hardware and electrical/electronic domains • Control all aspects of product configurations with software applications lifecycle • Improve software quality, accountability and compatibility Automotive component specialist Küster Automotive GmbH (Küster) found integrated ALM crucial to helping it achieve Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination (SPICE) Level 2. It also helped the company fully address original equipment manufacturer (OEM) customers’ Requirements Interchange Format (RIF) requirements. The company had found it difficult to manage the complex process to achieve the SPICE using Microsoft® Office software and sharing PDF files sent by email. An additional complication was the fact that the company’s OEM customers required exchange of
specifications in RIF and a system to manage change. The company found that with Polarion ALM, “the same system that supports our Automotive SPICE compliance also supports us as a part of the OEM supply chain,” Christian Posluschni says. The team leader for Development Electronics/Software Development added that the all-inclusive, webbased solution was easy to purchase and implement, and it offered a clear path to expand into testing and quality assurance without integrations. Another benefit, he said, is that Polarion allowed Küster to easily leverage other key technologies, such as TortoiseSVN for version control, MATLAB for modeling, and Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect for the Unified Modeling Language. According to Posluschni, Küster plans to broaden the scope of its activities now that it sees the benefit of integrated workflows. Next up: transitioning from manual to automated collection and integration of test results.
Try a better approach for incremental innovation in complex products Software is now integral to every industry, product and service. Indeed, it has become the dominant function of product development and overall product functionality, quality and reliability. To compete effectively, companies must improve the management and development of software, using ALM, and ultimately integrate it with PLM to create a single, unified development ecosystem.
Such a system will help companies meet the development challenges driving companies and their customers, enabling them to: • Manage product data complexity
In turn, the benefits to the business will be greater competitiveness, as better processes drive down costs and increase speed to market along with delivering more personalized products with more features and configurations.
• Optimize competing targets • Enable modularity and systemic reuse • Balance performance and quality attributes • Integrate and coordinate engineering disciplines
Learn more about how to implement a single, unified software-centric product development ecosystem.
For more information, please contact our Customer Support Center. Phone: 1-800-241-4453 E-mail: info.us@siemens.com usa.siemens.com/ modernize
A white paper issued by: Siemens. © 2018, Siemens Industry, Inc.
Published by Siemens Industry, Inc. 2018. Siemens Industry, Inc. 5300 Triangle Parkway Norcross, GA 30092 Printed in U.S.A. © 2018 Siemens Industry, Inc.
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