Task

In manufacturing rolling stock, Stadler relies on close partnerships with specialist suppliers. The passenger information systems for its vehicles are purchased as complete solutions from selected suppliers. In response to delays and recurrent problems in ongoing projects, Zühlke was commissioned to undertake a review of software development processes at Stadler and one of its suppliers. The result of the review was proposals and measures for improving the situation. The list of proposed measures enabled management at Stadler and the supplier to collaborate in determining which proposals to implement and what level of resources to allocate to their implementation.

Implementation

Zühlke’s engineer analysed working practices at the two organisations by:

• Carrying out structured interviews with the people involved at both sites.
• Examining the use of software tools (development environment, configuration management system, requirements engineering, etc.).
• Inspecting artifacts from the specific project (software architecture documents, software development plan, requirements documents, source code, etc.).
• Analysing the actual software engineering process as operated in practice.

Based on these insights and current software engineering best practices, Zühlke’s expert developed a list of measures for presentation to management at the two companies. This enabled the managers to decide which measures to implement, when, and what level of resources to allocate to them.