Concurrent Engineering and Software Development

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Concurrent EngineeringandSoftware Development

• Presented by
• Joe Cleetus
• jocle_at_cerc.wvu.edu
• Concurrent Engineering Research Center
• Feb 17, 2000

2
Context

• 80's realization that product manufacturing was
  lagging in USA
• Long product cycles
• Post-manufacturing defects
• Cost over-runs
• Failure to meet customer expectations

3
Approach

• Early association between manufacturing and
  design groups was seen as the key
• Close involvement of the customer and end-user
  was another fix proposed
• Reuse of existing knowledge and designs could
  save time, money, and defects
• The basis is COMMUNICATION

4
CE is a Process

• Hence, a way of working among those involved
• Cannot be automated, though you can provide
  support
• Needs a deep understanding and agreement to work
  in a certain way
• Therefore, requires the Organization and the
  People must subscribe to these ideas
• But you can realize your own version of CE

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One Definition of CE
Concurrent engineering is a systematic approach
to the integrated, concurrent design of products
and their related processes, including
manufacture and support. This approach is
intended to cause the developers, from the
outset, to consider all elements of the product
life cycle from conception through disposal,
including quality, cost, schedule, and user
requirements. -- Bob Winner et al.
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A Rather More General Definition of CE

• A Systematic approach
• to integrated product development that
  emphasizes
• response to customer expectations
• and embodies
• team values of cooperation, trust and sharing
• in such a manner that
• decision making
• proceeds with large intervals of parallel working
  by all life-cycle perspectives,
• synchronized
• by comparatively brief exchanges
• to produce consensus. -- Joe Cleetus

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Elements of CE

• Focusing on customers
• Teaming across the life-cycle
• Sharing information early
• Working in parallel, but cooperatively
• Making decisions as late as possible
• Improving processes individually and collectively
• Systems engineering (bringing the parts into a
  whole systematically, and considering the effects
  of each part on the whole)

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Some Barriers to CE

• Geographic dispersal
• Compartmental thinking encouraged by departmental
  organizations
• Project plan drawn up without allocation of time
  for planning and exploring of risk elements
• Inability to exchange hard data accurately among
  different perspectives
• Reward system

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Other Barriers to CE

• Being unwilling to share unfinished work
• Absence of tools to design with partial data
• Absence of tools to analyze the consequences of
  decisions
• Lack of budget at the front end of a project
• Having few exemplars practicing the new way
• Little commitment at the top

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Areas that need support

• Videoconference technology to help overcome
• distance
• Training to create a team ethos around a new
• project
• Project management organized around the team
• Exchange standards for data
• Common visibility of partial product data
• Common visibility of tasks
• Simulation

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What is needed

• Making the Remote look Local
• Making the Distributed look Unified
• Making the Heterogeneous look Homogeneous
• Making the Chaotic look Ordered
• Capturing Corporate Memory

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Social Aspects of Sharing

• talk to anyone about anything
• develop a high tolerance for ambiguity
• be willing to look stupid
• give more than you take
• cultivate fearlessness
• go on gut instinct and
• expand your sense of humor.

-- principles of effective networking suggested
by Chris Locke
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SW Support for CE

• Electronic Mail / Messaging
• Videoconference and Whiteboard with Shared
  Screens (WISIWYS)
• Calendaring and Scheduling
• Group Decision Support Systems
• Group Editing

• Workflow and Document Management
• Intranet Document Sharing
• Exchange standards like PDF
• Workgroup Products and Utilities
• Groupware Development Tools
• Internet Commerce

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HW Support for CE

• Powerful desktops with multimedia support
• ATM networking protocols for multimedia
• New devices for interaction (PDA)
• Wide availability of switched high speed lines
  (T1)
• Hardware compression
• Security via Virtual Private Networks
• NGI (bandwidth guarantees, and security at the
  network level)

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Process Issues in CE

• Formal assessment of CE practices in
  organizations (Karandikar 1992) -- Characterizes
  Processes and support technologies using a
  5-level SEI model. Tool called RACE
• Building a library of reusable CE processes by
  benchmarking the best organizations (Malone 1993)
• Re-engineering business processes in
  organizations -- still a hot consultancy service
  (Hammer, Stalk, Bower,..)
• Using Internet commerce to share information with
  suppliers and shorten lead times

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Summary

• CE is being absorbed into the Enterprise
  processes
• Technology support is advancing steadily
• Network infrastructure development is moving
  faster than anticipated
• CE is being manifested under many other names
• Green engineering promises to take CE into the
  furthest downstream perspective -- Disposal

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Metrics that validate CE

• Product development times compressed by 40 to 60
  in automotive firms (Ford, Chrysler).
• Conflicting requirements reconciled in
  semiconductor development (Intel - Pentium
  development team)
• Time spent in meetings reduced by 90
• Number of ECOs after first-ship reduced
  drastically
• Variable 15 to 26 days to deliver car according
  to customer order reduced to fixed 6 days (Toyota)

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Challenges

• Encouraging openness and sharing in
  organizations, while preserving the necessary
  confidentiality
• Making reward systems reflect the team efforts
• Making groupware as easy to use as telephones
• Making the new gigabit networks a low-cost and
  ubiquitous reality, much as roads are
• Developing more natural interfaces for personal
  computers and PDAs without increasing cost

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Communication

• Between whom
• Using what formal means and informal means
• When
• To Define what decisions
• What are the technologies that help

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Coordination

• What are the perspectives that concern Software?
• Describe some reciprocal relationships among
  perspectives
• Describe up-down and horizontal coordination
• Describe the nature of the coordination over time
  that need to take place
• Apart from generic communication that aids
  software development, what specific types of
  coordination would help?
• Notification
• Tools for assessing the consequences of decisions
  made by others

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Product Management

• What is the product?
• How do you classify it and structure it?
• What software packages help to manage it, from
  the least complex to the most complex, from the
  local to the global?
• How can Product and Process be combined?
• What about configuration control of different
  versions for different purposes?
• What is a build?

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Corporate Memory

• How do you retain what is useful that was
  developed in one project in order to enhance
  another project later?
• What human resource policies are needed to
  encourage this?
• What good principles of design help to formalize
  it?
• How do you ensure when someone else comes along
  to modify the code, s/he does not violate known
  constraints (good external specs, good internal
  remarks and comments)?

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Corporate Memory

• Who has corporate memory and where is it stored?
• How do you impart the lessons?
• How does one learn and progress?
• What is the first question to ask before you
  embark on a new software?

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Customer Focus

• Who is the customer? (Funding agency or user,
  user or systems staff)
• How do you ascertain the needs of the customer?
• What are the dimensions of his needs
  (compatibility, execution time performance,
  etc.)?
• How do you make the customer needs explicit
  (mockups, look and feel demos)?
• How do you incorporate flexibility for adjusting
  to future changed customer needs?

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Customer Focus

• When does the customer need to be involved?
• How do you delight the customer (on-time,
  on-budget, more features, greater openness of
  architecture, easier upgradability)?
• How do you gage customer satisfaction?
• Is there a formal acceptance?

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SW Processes

• Waterfall and spiral - what are the differences?
• How is the process regulated or enforced?
• Can you think of how CE can improve on the Spiral
  model?
• How is a process inspected by an auditor?
• What are personal processes practiced by
  individual engineers?

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SW Processes

• Throw one away - Fred Brooks
• How are schedules managed?
• What kind of project management aids the practice
  of CE in SW Development?

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Globalization

• Implications for SW Development - what aspects
  are distributed?
• What are the special needs for coordination?
• Implications for Software itself How do you
  endow software with internationalization
  properties?
• What is the language of software and software
  development?

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Parallel Working

• How do you break down a project?
• What are the disciplines that encourage parallel
  working?
• Parallel working within and across disciplines
• How do you bring it all together and ensure it
  fits?

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Documents

• Name as many documents as you can that should be
  prepared in a SW development project
• What are the tools that help you to prepare
  them?
• Typically there is a preparer, and approver and a
  distribution list. Take a document and state what
  these are. When a new software release occurs
  state what should accompany it.

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Linux

• Linux is modern phenomenon in software. Describe
  how collaboration and coordination takes place in
  Linux software, and how the needs of the customer
  are assessed.