In today’s product development, different engineering teams traditionally use independent tools that are specialized to engineering domains (mechanical, electrical/control, electronics, software).While the specialization of these tools has been proven locally efficient, it however contributes to fragmented results in Enterprise processes such as Requirement, Configuration and Change/Issue Management.

The proposal of a federated (virtual) system that orchestrates local engineering processes, connects related artifacts and consolidate results would certainly improve that situation especially in the software development area where Change is a constant feature.

Among others, the following areas of improvement can be considered, while preserving existing software engineering environments:

• Configuration/Change\Issue Management
  • Software change/issue management and Product change/issue management workflows integration
  • Software change implementation to be Product change impact analysis driven
  • Software change resulting artifacts integration to Product lifecycle management structures and related part revisions (artifacts: test results, binaries/firmware, interdependencies,…)
  • Management of software changes/Issues, tests in context of Product options & variants and requirements
• Requirement Management
  • Interaction of the Issue tracking system (product and discipline level) and the requirements management system(s)
  • Interaction of the issue tracking and the requirements management systems with the test management system(s)
  • Interaction of the issue tracking, requirements and test management systems with the help desk systems (e.g. CRM)

All connections shall be implemented with light weight, loose coupling methods, but also allow transition to full detail origination of the artifacts.

-- RainerE - 15 Mar 2010