Real-time agility

Agile methods are a cohesive set of concepts, principles and practices that form a key part of a continuous engineering capability for product development. These methods address what most consider the bane of software development:

To solve these challenges, the agile method integrates best practices for design and development, resulting in a development process that can

Agile principles have been applied successfully in many different real-time and embedded markets.

This paper introduces practical core principles and practices while demonstrating how such approaches can improve project results for embedded system development.

The IBM Systems Solution Library contains a set of embedded agile practices optimized for the development of software-intensive, real-time and embedded systems. The library is founded on the IBM® Harmony/Agile for Embedded Software Development process (hereafter referred to as the IBM Harmony/Agile process), which defines a set of core development principles.

Understanding these principles will help you to understand how the workflows are organized and the underlying reasons for the structure.

IBM Harmony/Agile process core principles

Your primary goal is to develop working software

You should always measure progress against the goal, not against the implementation

Your primary measure of progress is working software

The best way to avoid defects in your software is to avoid putting them there in the first place

Continuous feedback is crucial

Five key views define your architecture

Plan, track and adapt

The leading cause of project failure is ignoring risk

Continuous attention to quality is essential

Modeling is crucial

Figure 1: Practices and processes that support agile teams

The principles of agile, as defined in the IBM Harmony/Agile process, focus primarily on quality improvement and risk reduction, and only secondarily on team and developer productivity. Improving quality naturally improves productivity through a combination of reduction of rework and decrease in required retesting.

The wisdom of this approach is borne out by IBM’s success in applying these principles in the field.

The core principles of the IBM Harmony/Agile process are enacted by a set of detailed workflows, which guide engineering work in effective ways. Each flow contains a set of worker tasks, produced or consumed work products, and worker roles and responsibilities. Each practice focuses on a development aspect important for quality management and improvement.

Improperly managed project risk is a common cause of project failure. Risk is, ultimately, the product of two independent factors. The first is the severity of the risk and its potential impact on the successful completion of a project. For example, the severity of improperly estimating a schedule can be extremely high. Similarly, reliance on technology that proves ineffective in the target system (such as might occur if it is too slow or resource-intensive) can create a high-severity risk. The second factor is how likely a risk is to occur and lead to the failure of a project. If you have a history of producing high-quality software and the team and technology remain relatively unchanged, your exposure to risk is likely to be lower than if you have a history of high defect density, or if you are radically changing the development team, personnel or product technologies.

One of the key aspects of effective risk management is that risk should be mitigated as early as possible. It is about ensuring you get the requirements right from the start, validate them with users and stakeholders, and ultimately don’t build the wrong thing, causing defects downstream. This is why modeling is essential — to remove defects from the design early on. It maximizes forward progress and minimizes rework. Pounding out millions of lines of code quickly is not beneficial if that code isn’t meeting the customer need or if it is full of defects. It is far better to use these practices to avoid putting defects into the baseline code than to spend later effort to track down and repair hundreds or thousands of defects. Most agile practices reduce risk through early, continuous demonstration that the work products in development are of high quality and meet stakeholder needs. Work products that cannot be demonstrated to be of high quality are of little value.

Table 1. IBM Harmony/Agile practices for agile embedded software development

The practices in the The practices in the IBM Harmony/Agile process primarily focus on risk reduction, although some focus on process improvement. Table 1 shows the most important practices, the risks they address and their mechanisms of action.

When taking an agile approach to embedded software development, there are three time scales of interest.

The overall project time frame is called the macrocycle and spans the entire length of the project. It is constructed of some startup work (generally referred to as “pre-sprint planning”) and a set of microcycles.

The middle time scale is the microcycle. Each microcycle is 4 - 6 weeks in length and produces a version of the system on which verification and validation is performed. Figure 2 shows the primary activities of the microcycle.

Figure 2. IBM Harmony/Agile microcycle

The smallest unit of time is the nanocycle. It is generally between 20 and 60 minutes in length and produces an incremental version of one or more work products that can be assessed for quality. In the high-fidelity modeling nanocycle shown in figure 3, the inner loops result in executable code and unit tests that are created and applied on a highly frequent basis. This work results in models and code that are not only completely in sync, but they are also of very high quality and contain few defects.

Figure 3. IBM Harmony/Agile nanocycle

An efficient agile tooling environment provides assistance in doing engineering work using agile practices, facilitates creation and manipulations of work products, aids in worker collaboration and supports transparent project governance. Such a work environment requires implementation work templates generated from process and practice definition, and tight integration of the tools used by the various roles in the engineering environment.

The IBM solution for systems and software engineering is integrated on the IBM Jazz™ platform for agile collaborative systems and software delivery. Attuned to the needs of teams of all sizes from small, co-located project teams to large distributed teams, Jazz transforms systems delivery by making it more collaborative, productive and transparent—key aspects of any agile software development environment.

You can think of Jazz as an extensible framework that dynamically integrates and synchronizes the people, processes and assets associated with software and systems engineering projects. Unlike the monolithic, closed or point-to-point solutions of the past, Jazz is an open platform that supports the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) initiative for improving tool interoperability. Products built on the Jazz platform can leverage a rich set of capabilities for team-based software and systems delivery.

When silos form, product delivery effectiveness suffers. To respond effectively to ever-changing market needs, systems and software engineering teams must collaborate to manage lifecycle work products. The IBM solution for systems and software engineering provides an integrated system lifecycle management solution to support this collaboration.

Figure 4. The IBM solution for systems and software engineering

Process integration takes place in the IBM solution for systems and software engineering in a couple of different ways. First, the IBM Engineering Lifecycle Optimization - Method Composer tool allows teams to create process and guidance content that is compliant with the Software and Systems Process Engineering Metamodel (SPEM) standard. This includes guidance for workflows, practices, processes, tasks, work products, worker roles and various additions, such as checklists, concept definitions, examples and tool mentors. This content is published in an easily accessible way, usually as a website hosted within the development organization’s network.

The second form of process integration is the production of work-task templates from the process definition content, which can be used to support both planning (for example, assign an instance of the “Analyze Use Case” task to Susan) and governance (for example, reporting on the progress of assigned tasks). This provides managers and developers with a work environment in which tools, work products, process plans and project governance are tightly integrated. It also helps improve efficiency and the visibility of engineering information.

The IBM solution for systems and software engineering provides an integrated solution for the following systems and software engineering team roles.

The solution provides an integrated and collaborative environment for requirements analysis, architecture management and work, change and configuration management for teams of systems engineers. The leading products are IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Family or DOORS Next and IBM Engineering Systems Design Rhapsody with IBM Engineering Systems Design Rhapsody – Design Manager for systems engineering tasks, integrated with IBM Engineering Workflow Management for lifecycle management of the work products. IBM Engineering Lifecyle Optimization – Engineering Insights provides visualization, organization and analysis of linked-lifecycle data to enable rapid assessment of the impact of changes in an agile development environment. The integration with IBM Engineering Test Management enables strong collaboration with systems validation teams from the start of the project. Work-task templates are created from agile systems engineering practices to support task assignment, execution and governance.

Engineering Workflow Management and Engineering Test Management provide planning capabilities and work management for systems delivery teams throughout the project lifecycle and improve transparency through collaboration, automation and reporting on work products and project health.

The IBM solution for systems and software engineering, with Engineering Systems Design Rhapsody integrated with Engineering Workflow Management in the Eclipse IDE, provides a software development solution for software engineers. This integrates model-driven development, using SysML and UML, with the Engineering Workflow Management capabilities for team collaboration, including model configuration management, work items, change sets and continuous software build support. The solution also provides traceability to upstream systems engineering work products in Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Family or DOORS Next and Engineering Systems Design Rhapsody, or downstream traceability for systems integration and validation. Engineering Systems Design Rhapsody - Design Manager helps design teams and their stakeholders share, trace, review and manage designs.

Engineering Test Management provides a collaborative environment for test planning, construction and execution, supporting continuous verification within software engineering teams, as well as test management of system validation and acceptance testing. IBM Rational Build Forge® Standard Edition includes test lab automation capabilities that improve the efficiency of systems test labs and manage how test resources are requested and provided.

The interoperability of the IBM solution for systems and software engineering with other tooling means organizations can add agile capabilities while continuing to benefit from existing investments in key development infrastructure, such as the IBM Rational ClearCase® and IBM Rational ClearQuest® or the IBM Rational Synergy and IBM Rational Change configuration and change management environments.

Agile methods have their roots in software development. They are a set of practices and technologies meant to improve the quality of software work products and the productivity of engineering teams. Agile methods are based on a set of principles that emphasize work that correlates to quality and de-emphasizes activities that do not. The most important of these practices are incremental development, test-driven development, continuous integration and continuous execution.

Although agile methods come from the IT and enterprise software world, these practices and technologies apply equally well to real-time embedded software development. Through the use of high-fidelity modeling approaches and by organizing the workflow to use the agile practices, the quality of software engineering work products can be significantly improved while lowering the engineering cost.

That is, assess where your organization is and where it wants to be, adopt the technology in an incremental fashion using a pilot project with mentoring from experts, monitor success using key performance indicators, reassess, then deploy throughout your organization.

The IBM solution for systems and software engineering provides a combined tooling and agile practice environment for the various roles within the software-intensive systems engineering environment. Whether starting fresh or using existing tooling investments, tight integration between the core capabilities in the systems engineering environment supports agile teams in their efforts to deliver quality software and systems on time and within budget.

To learn more about how IBM can help you transition to an agile approach for your real-time embedded software development, please contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following IBM solution for systems and software engineering website: ibm.com/internet-of-things/solutions/systems-engineering

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