Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
ment environment need to be resolved. Product development is organized according
to product lines. As it is no longer competitive to develop multiple products one at a
time, the case company has adopted a product platform approach. Therefore, the
product is based on a product platform where the customer-specific features are con-
figured. The company produces complex automation systems where SW is a part of
the whole system. The improvement of ALM is focused on two SW teams (referred to
as “SW Team 1” and “SW Team 2”) each having several SW projects running in
parallel. Each team has about 10 members. The projects are currently geographically
distributed over several sites (two countries). Each project has typically less than 10
project members as reported the appropriate size for agile projects. Previously, pro-
jects have followed a partly iterative development process. SW Team 1 produces a
SW product that is one part of the common automation product platform, whereas SW
Team 2 produces SW products for specific industry segments. Projects have adopted
the agile development method, Scrum.
3.2 Research Process
To support ALM improvement work, the authors have defined the ALM framework
that has been used for documenting the company's ALM solutions as well as to find
improvement ideas for ALM solutions in company. The development of the frame-
work has been presented in [11, 12]. The principal elements of the Application
Lifecycle Management framework are the following:
Creation and management of
lifecycle artefacts, Traceability of lifecycle artefacts, Reporting of lifecycle artefacts,
Communication, Process support
and
Tool integration
. Figure 2 and 3 present the
history of ALM framework development and the history of the case company's ALM
improvement.
Increasing
understanding
& Creating
ALM framework
=> ALM solution v3.0 current state analysis in a
case company using ALM framework 2nd version,
defining relations between ALM elements
Phase 3
=> Applying ALM framework 2nd version,
ALM solution v2.0 current state analysis in a case company
Phase 2
=> Applying 1st version of ALM framework,
Collecting industrial ALM experiences from ALM solution v1.0,
Construction of 2nd version of ALM framework
Phase 1
Phase 1
Literature study
Literature study
=> Current status of ALM, 1st version of ALM framework
Time
Fig. 2.
Phases of ALM framework development and validation
The improvement work in SW teams has been a continuous activity and thus
ALM versions indicate the ALM solutions at a certain moment. The notable problem
with version 1 & 2 solutions related to the requirements management. The decisions
for improvements were made in project meetings or in retrospective meetings. Meth-
ods used for data collection during the first and second research phase have covered a
questionnaire for SW team members (two teams) and two interview rounds for the
project managers of SW teams. In this paper we present the results of the third
