Russell Burt
I am a Change Agent acting as a Project Manager with Management and Technical experience....
5 Years ago I converted our team over t... Read More
Russell Burt
I am a Change Agent acting as a Project Manager with Management and Technical experience....
5 Years ago I converted our team over to using a global quality management system {QMS}. The strategy was to get the engineers to perform engineering best practice, writing requirements, test cases and execution of test cases all into a tool called Quality Center. A free byproduct of this process is that the traceability was achieved for free. Once the data was entered I was able to query the back end database of Quality Center to create the QMS documentation. The engineers were felt productive without the documentation overhead, and the business was extremely pleased as we were one of the first groups to achieve QMS compliance.
2 Years ago, I converted the team to using Agile Software practices. Initially we had 1 month sprints to ease the team into the new methodology. Last year we converted to 2 week sprints. With more data points, the initiative was widely successful. Even more successful was my engineered navigation of the QMS. We performed a hybrid process to satisfy the waterfall nature of the QMS which required tollgates at each major waterfall milestone {Requirements, design, verification, validation}. I engineered a lean process to get us through the the requirements and design tollgates, perform agile until we were ready to release, then a quick verification and validation to satisfy the QMS.
This year, we started an initiative to move the team toward Continuous integration. That is, every piece of code would be delivered with a test harness. That test harness would be run at every build. A build would be kicked off at least nightly; preferably at check in. Additionally a suite of global system and automated UI tests would be kicked off. The goal was to give instant feedback to the engineer checking in the code and to provide a continuously deliverable code base. The initiative would pay for itself with 3 major releases scheduled for this year {ROI = 1 year} in addition to increased quality and speed of delivery.
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