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Month: August 2020

Kovair Solution for ASPICE & ISO 26262 Compliance

Software development in the automotive industry demands software designed for compliance. Kovair Automotive solution is designed and created ground up, having features and functionalities that adheres to safety-critical regulations in automotive product development enabling extended capabilities of sufficing to safety critical requirements as per the business needs of the organizations.
The Kovair Automotive solution provides a unified platform for the analysts and engineering teams to develop safety-critical automotive products, speeding up the time to market with pre-defined templates complying to the standards of Automotive SPICE (ASPICE) and ISO 26262 in a comprehensive architectural model. The solution is designed on a flexible framework such that if required it can be extended to accommodate any additional configurations that an organization may need to add to the solution to meet any of their specific business requirements.
Highlights
  • Facilitate faster development and delivery of products for automotive industry.
  • Streamline functional safety compliance capabilities adhering to ASPICE and ISO 26262
  • Templatized Automotive Solution compliant to ASPICE® and ISO 26262
  • Help in managing complex projects with enhanced tool quality, reduced miscommunications, and increased customer satisfaction.
  • Efficiently plan, track, and manage administrative and project tasks using Task Scheduler, Tasks and Timesheet Management
  • Enable transparency in processes and enforce process quality with a Task Based workflow.
  • Manage HARA with automated ASIL calculation and coverage for safety requirements engineering.
  • Monitor and manage failure modes, risks, and CAPA in relation to linked artifacts.
  • Ensure alignment across all stakeholders, development teams and suppliers through management of digital and traceable work products.
  • Integrate with more than 110+ tools across various areas of operation like ALM, PPM, PLM, ERP, CRM, etc.
  • Provide deeper insights into the development processes through built-in reporting and dashboards.
Kovair Automotive ALM Solution Kovair Automotive ALM Solution

Business Benefits of Kovair Automotive ALM Solution

  • Maximizes reliability and reduce time to market with a defined scope and synergy with requirements
  • Accelerate Functional Safety compliance for Automotive SPICE and ISO 26262 with an integrated, 100% browser-based collaborative platform and task-based workflow.
  • Gain complete visibility for the entire development lifecycle and simplify decision-making with end-to-end traceability, real-time customizable reports & dashboards.
  • Make audit preparations hassle free and efficient at reduced costs through continuous compliance with Automotive SPICE and ISO 26262.
  • Ensure alignment across product and engineering disciplines through ALM-PLM integration.
  • Follow best practices through Kovair Omnibus’ codeless configurable built-in workflow engine and solution template for automotive regulatory compliance.
  • Help minimizing implementation time with defined, pre-configured and exportable solution templates

Key Features for Automotive Solution

Requirements Management
  • Gather requirements from varied sources and manage those over a browser-based platform for analysis and change control.
  • Track, manage and validate complex system requirements enabling the elimination of risks that crop up with document-based systems.
  • Link high level customer requirements to more detailed hardware and software system requirements ensuring validation and verification before the releases.
  • Ensure correctness of requirements through task-based workflow
  • Kovair’s built in versioning and impact analysis capabilities help track the granular level of changes, compare changes between the versions and facilitate in performing proactive and reactive analysis.
Key-Features of Kovair Automative solution Key-Features of Kovair Automative solution Key-Features of Kovair Automative solution
Test Management
  • Enables defining of tests based on requirements, architecture, and designs.
  • Manage traceability to test cases used for safety-critical testing
  • Monitor test coverage in a real-time manner
  • Execute Test Cases and automatically submit Defects on the failure of a Test execution.
  • Ensure quality and customer satisfaction by reducing turn-around time using the mouse click configurable business rules and task-based workflow of Kovair ALM.
Test Management Test Management Test Management Test Management
Hazard Management
  • Kovair’s HARA (Hazard & Risk Analysis) Management allows to define and manage hazards depending on various hazard types and risk triggering events.
  • Increase the efficiency and precision of ASIL values by getting them calculated automatically using the calculated fields and business rule features of Kovair ALM
  • Associate every hazard with appropriate controllability, exposure and severity based on which the system automatically calculates an ASIL number and an ASIL flag to that Hazard as per the standard ASIL Determination formula.
  • Allows defining and linking of Safety Goals against each Hazard. From the Safety Goals, derive the Functional Safety Requirements. Decompose the Functional Safety Requirements into Technical Safety Requirements and finally define the Hardware and Software Safety Requirements.
Hazard Management Hazard Management Hazard Management
Release Management
  • Kovair Release Management allows you to design and automate customized workflows for software development lifecycle
  • Allows tracking the health of each of the Release in terms of whether the Releases are Finished Early, Finished Late, Days Left, Finished on Time along with the additional information displaying the actual number of days by which a Release is late, early, on time, etc.
  • Provides capability to build and present summarized information like Total number of Requirements implemented, Total No. of Open Defects, No. of Blocking Defects, No. of Verified Defects, for each of the Releases.
Release Management Release Management
Quality Assurance & Testing for the Automotive Solution
  • Kovair ALM comes with a wide range of customizable graphical and textual reports using the data from different artifacts used in the entire lifecycle phase.
  • Reports can be included in the different gadgets in various visual dashboards with drill down capabilities to monitor the KPIs and provide support in the decision-making process.
  • Leverage the benefit of custom template-based word reports for generation of any compliance related documents with the click of a button significantly reducing compliance audit time and costs.
  • A Dashboard can be assigned to multiple users and at the same time a user can have access to multiple dashboards depending on the privileges and access rights.
  • A Dashboard can be assigned to multiple users and at the same time a user can have access to multiple dashboards depending on the privileges and access rights.
  • Each report has drill down capabilities to monitor the KPIs and provide support in the decision-making process.
Quality Assurance & Testing for the Automotive Solution Quality Assurance & Testing for the Automotive Solution Quality Assurance & Testing for the Automotive Solution Quality Assurance & Testing for the Automotive Solution Quality Assurance & Testing for the Automotive Solution Quality Assurance & Testing for the Automotive Solution

Fig: Visual Monitoring through Reports and Dashboards

Manage System Engineering & Software development teams in one single platform
  • Maintain a common browser-based collaborative central platform to align mechanical engineering and software development teams involved throughout the automotive supply chain.
  • Perform model-based engineering with ALM and PLM processes through integration between tools from different ALM functions and PLM tools like Aras Innovator, PTC Windchill & Siemens Teamcenter.
  • Gain complete visibility across the product & application lifecycle through end-to-end traceability between requirements, development, testing, issue and defect management processes and all upstream and downstream artifacts, even across parallel streams of development.
  • Connect team members from different functions, external suppliers, tools & processes.
Tools Integration

Fig: Current Profile of Kovair Omnibus Integration

A US Regional Bank Migrates and Syncs Records from Microfocus ALM 12.53 to Azure DevOps using Kovair QuickSync
One of the world’s largest manufacturer & marketer of home appliances, headquartered in USA was using ServiceNow for managing the customer tickets & IBM Rational Team Concert for managing internal development. The usage of disparate tools from different vendors by different teams for software delivery brought in the challenge of real-time collaboration between the teams and visibility to the management. This Kovair customer is one of the most successful companies in the Fortune 500 List. It operates globally in Semiconductors and other Electronic Components with it headquarter in Silicon Valley, USA.

Challenges

Data Migration from one tool to the other always brings along certain challenges as mentioned below:
  • The volume of data to be migrated from Microfocus ALM was in thousands and migrating these without automation was a mammoth task for the Bank.
  • Specific interrelationships were to be migrated – Specific relationship link migration out of all the existing relation links was a challenging task.
  • Being cross-vendor tools, one from Microfocus ALM and the other from Microsoft, there exists no out-of-the-box connectivity between them.
  • Microfocus ALM 12.53 and Azure DevOps have contrasting differences in the data models for various artifacts.
  • Records from multiple Microfocus projects were to be migrated into Azure DevOps projects. Merging items from multiple Microfocus ALM projects to fewer structured Azure DevOps project was another big challenge for this project.
  • The Bank was using several AD users not having access to the Azure DevOps Organizations. Mapping and migrating those users were a challenging job.
  • All Attachments and Comments associated with all Microfocus ALM artifacts including Design Steps and Call Tests must be migrated to Azure DevOps.
Last but not the least, the Bank also wanted to Synchronize the records that were entered in Microfocus ALM during migration after the entire migration was over. All these challenges added up to the complexity of the data migration and made it extremely challenging to be done manually.

Kovair Solution

Kovair, in the first step of the migration, started understanding the data structure and reaching a consensus on the migration use cases with the client. Kovair used its data migration and synchronization solution – Kovair QuickSync for migrating the data. QuickSync tool was installed in a server at the client’s organization. Before initiating the configuration of QuickSync, Kovair analysed the existing data structure of Microfocus ALM Projects and took a confirmation from the client on the field and artefact mapping. After this, the configuration consisting of mapping the Projects, Artifacts, and Fields between Microfocus ALM and Azure DevOps was done on a project by project basis. The entire configuration was achieved through simple mouse clicks without the need for any coding. As there were altogether 20 projects to be migrated, the client preferred to go in the route of sequential migration. Every project went through the sequential phases of configuration of field and artefact mapping, data migration and data validation post migration. Initially, the customer performed POC with a small project in their staging environment and once they were satisfied with the POC results, migration of production data took place. The migration took care of the most complex challenge – the contrasting data structure in the following ways:
  • The Microfocus ALM Defects were migrated as Bugs in Azure DevOps.
  • Microfocus ALM Tests were migrated as Test Cases in Azure DevOps by maintaining the same Test Plan hierarchy.
  • Apart from the artifacts, the corresponding attachments, comments, user values, parent-child relations and the relationship links across all the artifacts were migrated.
  • Kovair was able to overcome the challenge of migrating the data in a way that was not supported as per the ADO workflow.
  • Upon completion of the migration, Kovair also synchronized all the records that got inserted on Microfocus ALM during the time of migration to ADO.
Kovair QuickSync also facilitated users to have real-time monitoring of the migration. The volume of successful and failed transactions could be monitored from one single window. In case of failed migration, detail level logs were maintained which provided root cause for each of the individual failures. This detailed level of information helped to identify the root cause behind most of the failures. These records were then re-migrated after the problems were fixed. The entire migration happened for 60000 records with a <.01% error.
Data Hierarchy between Microfocus ALM and Azure DevOps
Fig: Data Hierarchy between Microfocus ALM and Azure DevOps

Kovair QuickSync Business Values

  • Easy tool installation and quick initial setup.
  • Codeless configuration for mapping the Microfocus ALM Projects, Entities and Fields to the Azure DevOps counterparts.
  • Successfully migrated 20 projects including Requirements, Tests and Defects to Azure DevOps.
  • Easy monitoring capabilities having an objective and subjective statistical view of the state of migration with reports and logs.
  • Retry mechanism for any unsuccessful migration.
  • Turnkey solution based upon the transaction volume of data across all configurations and projects for any number of users.
  • 100% migration with <0.1% failure.

Conclusion

Kovair QuickSync allowed the Bank to overcome all challenges of data migration and move from Microfocus ALM 12.53 to Azure DevOps within 4 weeks in an incremental manner. The complete data got successfully moved from Microfocus to Azure DevOps by maintaining the hierarchy, relationships and attachments of the record across all the artifacts.