An automobile manufacturer cuts software validation time by 90 percent

This company employs approximately 24,000 people and generates an annual revenue in excess of GBP13 million.

Managing increasingly complex requirements

The company sells its automobiles in more than 170 countries and has major emerging markets in China, India, South America and Africa. One of the company’s primary goals is to quickly and cost-effectively deliver vehicle features that meet unique marketplace demands. For example, it needed to develop in-vehicle entertainment systems capable of delivering different media and content to four occupants, including the driver. With an increasing number of vehicle features, the organization also needed to effectively maintain a greater range of options and combinations from which customers could choose.

To meet these goals, the company first needed to improve its development processes. The company had inflexible development tools that were not widely adopted by development teams. These tools failed to provide a comprehensive view of the development lifecycle, which often led to delays in development and increased costs. In particular, the company had excessive warranty costs of USD1.5 billion resulting from a warranty cost of USD6,000 per vehicle.

The company wanted to implement a standard requirements methodology that would facilitate requirements reuse and improve communication between the business and the supply chain. With approximately 6,000 engineers at multiple sites around the world and tens of thousands of development requirements, The organization sought a seamless way to deliver requirements and changes from one team member to other team members and teams in near-real time.

Creating a requirements management and modeling system

After evaluating many available solutions, the company implemented a suite of IBM® Rational® software to create a new requirements management and modeling system. The company installed:
● IBM Rational DOORS® software to provide requirements management
● IBM Rational Rhapsody® software to model the company’s entire in-vehicle entertainment system from a user perspective
● IBM Rational ClearCase® software to store the models and corresponding code
● IBM Rational ClearQuest® software to manage bugs and fixes

Using the Rational applications, the organization can now create new development specifications in a format that can be quickly adapted and understood across many development and partner sites around the planet. The company uses the Rational software tools to help ensure that new features, such as in-vehicle entertainment systems, interface correctly with the electrical and mechanical architectures of its vehicles.

Using Rational DOORS software, the company can facilitate the traceability of all of its entertainment-system development requirements, from customer-facing features to specifications for embedded-software components. By integrating the Rational DOORS software with Rational Rhapsody modeling software, the company can immediately see how even the lowest-level changes affect the overall model. The organization uses Rational ClearCase software to carefully control the traceability of the Rational Rhapsody models and the software code they generate.

To support testing, the company also uses Rational DOORS software to store test vectors and make them available to the company’s National Instruments Corp. (NI) suite of testing software. Further, when the client runs a test in the NI environment, the Rational ClearCase software immediately receives a test report. If the test detects any bugs, the Rational ClearQuest software automatically creates a ticket and assigns the repair to the appropriate party.

Decreasing the time required for software validation and bug detection

By using an integrated suite of Rational software to support the development of its in-vehicle entertainment systems, the company reduced the time required to fully validate software for a given permutation by more than 90 percent, from six to eight weeks to only three days. When the company writes a new requirement, the Rational software automatically generates a test case and allows employees to perform the test on the end product.

The company also reduced the time required to detect bug causes by more than 99 percent, from three days of human intervention to 30 seconds of automated detection. When developing the previous generation of its in-vehicle entertainment system, the client had approximately 10,000 bugs to investigate. The automation helps the company achieve dramatic savings in terms of staff hours and effort. Further, because the system provides a transparent overview of fix assignments and required resources, program managers can better delegate tasks.

At the business level, the company uses the Rational software to increase innovation and greatly accelerate time to market for its in-vehicle entertainment systems. Because the client’s globally distributed engineers and developers now work as a more transparent and collaborative team, they no longer exhaust all of their work time simply meeting requirements. Instead, they can spend time conceptualizing and developing new features. As a result, the company expects to increase sales and generate a high return on its investment in the Rational software.

For more information

To learn more IBM Rational software, please contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following website: ibm.com/rational