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Mansfield, Massachusetts USA
"This new CM has allowed us to drop our cycle times."
-- Jed Johnson, Director of Engineering, Motorola
"Other vendors could show you work-around solutions because
they do not deliver on the concept of roles, and the ability to create
rules based on user roles and the state of the object. Only Continuus
featured them as core product functionalities."
-- Jed Johnson, Director of Engineering, Motorola
Since 1971, Motorola's Transmission Products Division, part of Motorola's Information Systems Group in Mansfield, Mass., has led the market in modern technology. As competition has grown over the years, maintaining leadership has meant bringing high-quality, new products to market faster.
As its product offering grew, however, Motorola had difficulty predicting ship dates and maintaining product quality. Deliveries were unreliable, and it was nearly impossible to measure quality before products hit the field.
Motorola selected Continuus/CM to replace a 10-year old file-based configuration management tool. Based on a client/server architecture, Continuus/CM helps engineering teams coordinate and streamline software development by providing process-oriented configuration management. Over 75 engineers, managers, and technicians access the software from HP 715/33 workstations connected to servers. With Continuus/CM as the foundation of its new CM process, Motorola can now predict product development cycles within a 15% accurate rate. Better yet, the company develops and markets more products each year, and a 50% reduction in the numbers of customer problems reported shows that product quality has indeed improved.
As the size of Motorola's Transmission Products teams grew and the company's products offering grew, Motorola had difficulty predicting ship dates and maintaining product quality. Deliveries were unreliable, and it was nearly impossible to measure quality before products hit the field. Repairing modems once they were in customers' hands was difficult and expensive, consumer valuable engineering resources that were spent on developing new products.
The company embarked on a mission to improve its team efficiency by better managing the flow of work throughout the development process. The first step was to map its processes against the Capability Maturity Model, defined by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). The SEI's maturity model ranks excellence in development practices; Motorola's goal was to move to Level 2, with an ultimate goal of achieving Level 5.
Continuus/CM has played a significant role in moving up the maturity model and improving team-oriented development process. Continuus offers a "Team Engineering" approach to software development by fully, and unobtrusively managing the entire configuration management process.
Team Engineering, a new approach to software engineering, addresses the requirements of team-oriented development, regardless of the location of size of teams. It involves workflow functionality, which manages the flow of projects through the complete lifecycle, for example, automatically changing object state, users, role and access privileges as projects are promoted to new states.
Continuus also supports teams working in parallel development, enables individual team members to choose their own "view" of projects and files, and provides robust functionality such as advanced configuration and build management.
Since implementing Continuus, one of the most dramatic improvements has been in parallel development. Because the old system did not support concurrent development, fixes for different releases often had to be made in independently and merged after those products shipped. In some cases, this was impossible because another release was already under way, and the last release would then have to bear the burden of the merge.
"Entire development teams could spend weeks merging releases that had been built at the same time, and we had to allow for longer development cycles. "
"Now with Continuus/CM we've completely eliminated the 'merge mania'," said Jed Johnson, Director of Engineering at Motorola. "This new CM has allowed us to drop our cycle times."
As a testament to its successful re-engineering effort, Motorola simultaneously released an entire line of the new v.34 modern products well before the competition. Without Continuus, the products would have to been shipped one after the other, but with Continuus/CM's parallel development capabilities, Motorola could beat competitors to the punch with a full product line.
File Date: 09/18/95