The situation
A leading international organization in the semiconductor industry has been evolving continuously for more than 20 years from mechanical systems to complex mechatronic systems. The transformation was implemented by integrating only low-level electronics (microcontrollers), which are not sufficient for Industry 4.0 and the exponentially growing proportion of software components. Machines increasingly require automation, and customers expect more specialized variants.
At the beginning, the organization faced these growing challenges with individual developers who operated without advanced software development methods, such as requirements engineering, release management, test automation and continuous integration. Since there was no existing software development process, the organization had difficulty in planning releases and frequently had to deal with software errors. Since change management was also missing and changes were implemented on demand, the organization was not able to maintain the software or reuse it in the long term.
Eventually, due to pressure from its customers, the organization realized that it needed a software development process with the state-of-the-art technology and asked UL Solutions Software Intensive Systems (SIS) for external support in introducing and implementing advanced software development methods.
Project duration and resourcing
- Two years
- One systems engineer (enterprise architect)
- Two requirements engineers (TFS, DOORS Next)
- One product owner
- One Scrum Master
- Five engineers (#C, WPF, WCF, Ranorex, nSubstitute, xUnit, TFS)
Our approach
Together with the customer, the SIS team created a concept with the goal of efficiently solving these problems and challenges in the near term.
As a first step, SIS supported the customer on the selection of an appropriate toolchain for requirements engineering, software engineering and test automation.
Then the SIS team introduced the agile software development process Scrum into software development so the customer could react more flexibly to content changes and stakeholder requests. Furthermore, the development team was enabled to better represent progress in development in sprint reviews.
SIS addressed the problem of poor software quality by introducing a comprehensive testing concept that included the creation of test specifications, the introduction of unit tests with workshops at the class level of nSubstitute and xUnit, the development of test automation with Ranorex to implement integrations and software tests, and the mental and technical coaching of the development team.
Furthermore, SIS engineers developed a simulator (C#, WPF, WCF, .NET) that simulates the applied PLC and so enables development of product software without real machines. With the simulator, the team accelerated the development cycles, as parallel development of product software was made possible. The simulator was also an important component for test automation.
Highlights of our approach
- Continuous integration (TFS).
- Coaching and introduction of the agile software framework Scrum.
- Coaching and introduction of systematic testing methods on all test levels.
- Test automation (Ranorex).
- Unit testing (nSubstitute, xUnit).
- Development of a simulator (C#, WPF, WCF, .NET).
- Coaching on the topics requirements engineering, UML, software architecture, software tests.
Benefit
Due to the excellent cooperation between the customer and SIS, a new product line was successfully introduced in the market after only one year.
The customer’s employee morale significantly improved as the customer repeatedly received positive feedback on the software’s stability.
The test framework for test automation is modularly designed and can easily be transferred to other product lines without great adaptation efforts.
The customer was extremely satisfied by the technical knowledge of the SIS team and commissioned SIS again to support the development of new product lines. SIS, together with the customer, now creates a software platform that will be used for different product lines of the organization.
Key benefits to our customer
- Successful delivery of a new product line
- Release and bug management
- Significant increase in software quality
- Significant improvement in morale among employees
- Consistent further development by coaching
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