Introduction

Concurrent Engineering is a software life cycle process by which the company may develop high-quality, consistent software products with a minimum of maintenance. The quality process includes both product correctness and process assurance, allowing each to be validated and improved. The Concurrent Engineering process is scaleable for different size projects, full new build projects or installation of purchased packages, standard priority or urgent projects, and includes the methods by which to prove out which category the project should belong.  

Benefits

On average, the U.S. software industry exceeds their predicted completion dates by 250%. Concurrent Engineering, with its built-in verification process, claims to predict the correct completion date to within 20%. Carolla Development's experience installing Concurrent Engineering in its client companies has improved the accuracy to within 15%.

Concurrent Engineering complies with the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) of the Software Engineering Institute. A national de facto standard, the CMM is a measure of an organization's productivity and ability to develop quality systems. Concurrent Engineering has been shown to at least double the productivity of organizations using it. Studies have shown that moving to the first stage of the CMM requires 2-3 years; Concurrent Engineering typically requires 15-18 months to install. It is also compliant with the ISO 9000-3 software guideline, which is in process to become an international standard.  

Infrastructure, Commitments, and Assumptions

This document assumes that the organizational structure and processes necessary to implement Concurrent Engineering and maintain its effectiveness in the organization are provided. Namely:

• Guarantee an upper management commitment to the long term, to support the installation process and to avoid collapse of the process and another fad-of-the-month management quest.
• Develop a strong QA policy and organization to ensure compliance with the process.
• Provide the organizational roles to support Concurrent Engineering, either by training existing personnel or requesting services from outside the current organizational structure.
• Get commitment from organizations outside the development groups to support the departmental interfaces necessary, e.g., marketing, customer groups, operations, financial groups.

The following list identifies the phases of Concurrent Engineering and the goal for each. After each goal is a set of bullet items that indicate the primary criteria that must be met for that phase to have accomplished its purpose. Violation of any of these criteria will result in damage to the quality process, and subsequent inadequacies to the project.

1. Project Identification
   Goal:  Ensure a single direction for corporate development to avoid shifting priorities, false project starts, and pre-empted project efforts. Provide a simple, clear process to start the project track.
   • Get executive commitment and goal consistent with business objectives and corporate vision for project.
   • Define a central point for approval, prioritization, and scheduling for all projects.
2. Project Scope
   Goal:  Estimate the project's effort, time, and cost so executives can make an informed decision about the project's worth.
   • Confirm the expectations of the Customers and get consensus with them and the executive and corporate goals.
   • Support the project's success by avoiding unrealizable date or budget constraints or unallocated resources.
3. Requirement and Analysis
   Goal:  Build and validate a model of the business problem domain to ensure the correct problem is defined and customer needs are accurate before attempting a solution.
   • Get requirements jointly with the user and write a specification that can be implemented, tested and explained.
   • Provide traceability between the customer needs, system solution, and testing to enable change management.
   • Justify project needs are best met by comparing purchase, build, or hybrid solutions (cost/benefit analysis of vendor proposals).
4. System Design
   Goal:  Provide a technical solution that meets the customer needs and enhances the corporate business position and value.
   • Design and validate a technical solution at the high level.
   • Define metrics to predict time of implementation and development effort, and to be used later for process improvement.
   • Build a test plan from the requirements, not the design or code.
5. Development Planning
   Goal:  Define a work plan for implementing a technical solution, whether a purchased package, new development, maintenance change, or a hybrid.
   • Collect work plans for testing, customer acceptance, development, and documentation, and ratify with all involved.
   • Get written consensus on the project plan specification from all involved.
   • Define a strong QA policy to ensure process compliance and product correctness.
   • Establish configuration management for changes, defect resolution, and project control.
6. Construction
   Goal:  Install or construct the solution, using a mini-release, risk-driven and priority-driven approach, to run concurrently with testing and low-level design. Validate low-level design, collecting interface specifics (e.g., screen and report layouts) from customers.
   • Perform regression testing to maintain quality and avoid later rework.
   • Track personnel effort, time, and defect rate to monitor project and set a baseline for calibrating the project team and process efficacy.
   • Separate developers from any testing except unit testing and their contribution to system testing.
   • Define a procedure by which QA and the customers approve the release, and not the development team.
7. Installation and Assessment
   Goal:  Ensure a solid and methodical way of moving the product into the customers' environment as smoothly as possible.
   • Emulate the production environment to test the final product for capacitance, stress, and performance. Examine growth potential and adjust accordingly.
   • Access the project and process with the collected metrics to improve the process and calibrate the teams for future predictability.

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