Does the following sound all too familiar to you?

Delivery to the customer was delayed 6 months, again.

Project costs overshot by a factor of 2.5 compared to original planning, again.

Every 3rd customer is complaining about your product.

Wouldn’t it be nice if …

… your product were ready to release before the delivery due date?

… your development costs stay below the original plan?

… your customers give only positive feedback on your product?

Leverage the 3DSE System & Software Development Framework to

• boost your development speed by up to 25%.
• cut development costs by up to 20% and
• enhance the start-up quality by up to 15%

for increasingly software centric products.

With the „software defined“ revolution in full swing, there are several changes and challenges to be mastered. Especially established development organizations with a proven track-record in hardware focused products, now face the question how to successfully shift to software intensive solutions?

Create customer value with speed, high quality and compliant software-intense systems via 12 actionable key capabilities from the 3DSE System & Software Development Framework

Customer Focus

1. Put customer first and center

A detailed understanding of the needs and requirements of ones customer base is crucial to align all activities to create differentiating value for the target customer. Having customer persona models can help to identify the values perceived by the customers. Particularly, comparing usability with other software-centric products the customer is used to in daily life and understanding the customer’s application flow helps to focus on the customer perspective.

Strategic Boundaries

2. Strategically manage solution portfolio

Clarity on the offered product solutions enables alignment with the wider organization on what makes the difference for the market. Focus is put on ensuring the right mix, ideally with modular expandability, with clear differentiation for each product segment and target market. The product portfolio builds on market trend knowhow, considers relevant technology roadmaps including hardware vs software implementation trends and is actively managed. Having a clear vision, mission and derived targets builds the foundation for the strategically managed solution portfolio.

3. Build digital x-functional continuity & manage data

The IT tool landscape is designed to ensure transparency and continuity. Relevant data is easily accessible and easy to interpret for supporting data driven development. This includes typical electronic data points as well as mechanical force field information.

4. Partner strategically

Own strengths and weaknesses are identified to enable the selection of a suitable and complementing partner. The partnership is built on trust, mutual understanding and aligned targets to work closely for joint success in a long-term cooperation. Considering partnerships between rather hardware-centric and more software-focused companies, a common language is essential to avoid unnecessary misunderstandings.

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Development Core

5. Manage system & software requirements and trace for compliance

Ensuring traceability of customer needs via derived technical requirements all the way to the implementation, in either combination of hardware and software. This, with an end-2-end consistent and unambiguous requirement structure, allocating the requirements after the decomposition to respective layers and defining clear ownership. Important is here to consider also possible implementation choices in hardware and software as well as their interaction to fulfill the requirements.

6. Shape, manage & communicate integrated system & software architecture

Create an architecture, fitting for the product strategy, that maps the end-2-end requirements and enables decoupling for implementation options via hardware and software and re-using via modularization. Together with the transparency on dependencies and interworking achieved by functional chain models, the architecture serves also as a tool for communication and alignment across the various involved development domains. Software knowhow paired with understanding technology trends and customer orientation makes for a good overall system architecture.

7. Synchronize hardware & software, enable continuous integration and manage maturity

Align the overall test strategy according to the original customer requirements utilizing various integration levels towards a continuous integration and a clear pathway to compliance for verification. Synchronization and mapping of hardware and software availability is another stepstone towards shortened release cycles and continuous releasability as well as test automation. Classic „plan-driven“ approaches for mainly hardware dominant and security relevant aspects and iterative „Agile“ software development principles complement each other for the overall solution view.

8. Control configurations, variants, versions and changes

Decide each variant and software branch consciously with a clear view on resulting implications like lifecycle efforts for maintenance and user impact in compatibility. Managing variants and versions with integrated configuration and change processes as well as state-of-the-art tools will also ensure compliance with relevant standards and regulations and support continuous integration & releasability. Clearly communicated software branching strategies and synchronized “multi-speed” development help to minimize free floating variants and to respond quickly to market developments and needs.

Enabler

9. Utilize building standards and end-2-end processes for system & software quality

Implement easy to use end-2-end processes for cross departmental agreed approaches. Ensure their compatibility with required standards and regulations. Utilize industry best practices, standardized modules & components as well as software libraries combined with a well-defined software repository strategy considering access speed, regulatory requirements and data integrity and safety. For example, ASPICE may serve as a tool guiding towards end-2-end integrated system and software solutions and implementing sustainable and user centric processes.

10. apply model driven development for system & software

Create possibilities to test software intense systems modular and early with simulation environments and thus identify and fix issues early on. Maintain and continuously improve the simulation models to best adopt real-life scenarios and thus improve both model and module quality.

11. Organize according to architecture and agile, interdisciplinary workflow

Adapt and establish organizational structures that best suit the development flow for software intense systems in complex ecosystems with empowered cross-functional teams. The solution portfolio also benefits from this approach with valuable feedback and insights gathered, considering various perspectives.

12. anchor system thinking and lead integrative

Caring and adaptive leadership creates the opportunities for individual personal development and highly motivated teams. Knowing the overall target and big picture creates awareness and identification with the corporation and the offered solutions with each contributor. This is further strengthened by offering opportunities to gain a system view from different perspectives and an incentive system aiming for the global optimum.

Take the next step towards your software defined success and get in touch with us!

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