Introduction
Honeywell Technology Solutions Lab (HTSL) is an integral research, development and engineering arm of Honeywell. It provides value to Honeywell’s businesses and customers through technology, product and business solutions that meet global standards of quality, innovation and lifetime performance. Employing diverse engineering skills, along with program management, quality assurance, systems engineering, technology and market analytics, HTSL provides business oriented total solutions to Honeywell’s businesses in the areas of Aerospace, Automation and Control Solutions, Specialty Materials and Transportation Systems. HTSL has its headquarters in Bangalore and centers in Shanghai, Beijing, Brno, Hyderabad, and Madurai. It is one of the larger R&D outfits established by multi‐national corporations in India. HTSL is a SEI CMMI Level 5 company, and has also attained PCMM Level 5 maturity.
Business Scenario
At HTSL, the various groups, such as Requirement Writers, Development, QA and Project Management teams were working independently in separate silos and it was difficult to track the current status of the implementation of the requirements. Hence, a system was required wherein one could see the details of the requirements and their relationships with other artifacts. HTSL required an application that could be used by the groups to manage the requirements, test cases, design elements, and defects. The Requirement Writers would create the requirements. These requirements would then be reviewed approved by peers and Customers. Once approved, the Development Team would implement these requirements. The development builds would then be checked into Subversion or ClearCase. The file contents of the SVN/CC files would be made available on demand through federation architecture. The QA team would generate the test cases based on the requirements. Once the test cases are executed, the defects generated would flow into JIRA.
Challenges
The major challenge for HTSL was managing requirements. Requirements, if not managed correctly can lead to high‐level of rework throughout the project lifecycle, and team‐members also get tired of redoing the work because of requirements getting changed frequently. Besides, there is always a “question mark” on whether the product meets the approved requirements.
Solution
Kovair Application Lifecycle Management Solution provides a rich and configurable, global platform for implementing Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) process, collaborating on the entire development cycle and tracing implementations back to original requirements. Kovair Application Lifecycle Management Solution ensures that all the stake holders and team members are working on the same work area, no matter where they are located, and that there are no costly last minute surprises. As a result, it is rated as a top quality application that matches Honeywell’s requirements and complies with their internal and external Requirements Management.
Kovair Application Lifecycle Management Solution was fully custom configured (codeless mouse‐click configurations) to meet Honeywell’s requirements, which included domain and safety specific challenges. The final Application Lifecycle Management Solution implemented at Honeywell consisted of the following entities or objects:
- Successful completion of a customized and complex use case scenario.
- Projects
- Requirements
- Design Elements
- Test Designs
- Test Sets
- Test Cases
- Test Steps
- Test Runs
- Defects
Conclusion
Honeywell has achieved all their goals of Requirements Management for the REM and HTS projects by implementing Kovair Application Lifecycle Management Solution – the ALM in their organization, and are very pleased with the outcome.