Peter Fassbinder
Peter Fassbinder
Principal Key Expert for PLM Process Innovation at Siemens IoT Services, PhD
Continuous Quality Management: how to overthrow your milestone approach, yet keep industrial quality standards
Wednesday 03/11/20 from 2:30 pm - 3:00 pmA prerequisite for continuous deployment of software to a production system is a continuous build, integration, and delivery toolchain with a high degree of automation. Such a Continuous Integration pipeline provides built-in quality mechanisms and real-time quality status information of the software. In an industrial environment, however, delivering software requires a lot more than just functioning software: numerous further – non-software – artifacts are required for a deployment (e.g. patent analysis, product risk analysis, safety certifications, operations guidelines, sales documentation to name just a few). To formally release and deploy a change into a production environment, many essential activities are required that cannot be covered by the toolchain, no matter how sophisticated it is. Today, these quality criteria are covered by milestones/quality gates. Applying the classical quality gate approach is not an option anymore, however, as this would limit the deployment frequency to figures not even near the desired target. Therefore, a radical rethinking of the current release process is required. This presentation provides a new perspective on evaluating and tracking of non-software related quality criteria, enabling industrial companies to take advantage of the benefits of continuous deployment, while maintaining their high standard of quality. It introduces the concept of continuous enabling, which – in combination with continuous integration of the software – allows continuous deployment. We transferred a key idea of Continuous Integration to the release process. Within a fully automated toolchain, every code change is instantly verified against the existing system, a mantra referred to as "Green to Green." This mantra can be applied to the non-software artifacts of an industrial product as well, overthrowing the milestone-based quality management approach. This is the core of Continuous Quality Management, our approach to open up the possibility, also for industrial companies, of deploying into production systems much more frequently than today. This presentation guides you through the key ideas of our approach and provides examples of how this can be implemented and managed in practice.