Aligning Software Development Teams through Collaborative Design Management

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A wall separates subject matter experts from the actual design process which includes disparate teams using different tools and traditional source control systems to share and trace information.

Design management capabilities of IBM Rational Rhapsody allow The Mathworks Simulink and Rational Rhapsody models to be stored in a central location for searching, linking and reviewing.

After months of hard work, the team was finally ready to flip the switch on the new heads- up display on a vehicle prototype. The system would be supplied to a major automotive manufacturer and would make or break the company. The CEO and VP of engineering were present to see it working for the first time. All the subsystem tests were flawless and it should only be academic at this point. Just flip a switch and time to celebrate. But something was amiss and no display was seen. After several hours of debugging it was discovered that the display team missed a change in the angle of the windshield causing the display to not work. The supply contract was awarded to the competition and the team started working on their resumes. This fictional story is one that plays out all too often in developing today’s complex systems.

Delivering innovative products to market requires diverse teams to collaborate, including technical and non-technical disciplines such as hardware, software, testing, mechanical, management, marketing, and sales. However, development teams each use a diverse set of tools and applications to suit their own particular department, often with a proprietary data format. The team shares information by manually creating document based reports or point to point tool integrations.

Collaborative Design Management (CDM) allows teams to share, search, link, analyze, and review design information across tools using linked lifecycle data and principles from the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) community. CDM also helps cross-discipline teams collaborate earlier in the development process to avoid design pitfalls and costly errors uncovered later during integration.