STEPS

System & Test Engineering Project SuiteSTEPS IS A SOFTWARE PRODUCT BASED ON THE ORIGINAL PTESY  CONCEPT ESSENTIAL HIGH-LEVERAGE METHODOLOGIES AND TOOLS FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE PROJECT DESIGN PROCESSES

THE NEEDED QUALITY STANDARDS (R)EVOLUTION

During the last quarter of the Twentieth Century the industrial world made very huge investments in quality, most of all in the production processes. The results of those investments are controversial, mainly due to the redundant complication and proliferation of standards, different in titles, but substantially similar as contents.

During the last ’90s and the first decade of the Twenty First Century, a real shift of paradigm occurred, and several new, progressive, concepts saw the light. And the focus moved to the design processes, nomore only on the production processes.

The concept of maturity (Capability Maturity Model, by SEI, Massachusetts) is more suitable, for a better approach to the project life cycle management.

Mechanical Quality vs. Electronic Quality– The methodology standards were born in industrial age, for mechanic industry, and are oriented to serial production processes. Electronics and computer science brought to a hugely greater freedom and flexibility.The critical focus moved to design processes.

Public Quality vs. Private Quality – Developed mainly in the public segment (Aerospace and Defence) methodologies are expensive and not efficient.

Standards as products for market– A real market of standards was born. Many similar standards were made, increasing confusion. This is conceptually opposite to the basic philosophy of the quality standards, which recommends that each requirement was unic, until when a differentiation is needed (due to technological or process reasons).

Cultural delay about the use of software tools to support methodologies indeed – methodologies are not sustainable, without suitable software tools.

Some recent standards aim in counter-current, with respect to the continuous standard proliferation:
– the focus moved from documents to processes
– a certain generalization is searched: horizontal methodologies, valid for any hightech technologies
– an approach to essential: opposite to code everything in minimum details

The capabilities considered primary, in this new scenario, includes:
– productivity and efficiency (duly measured and documented)
– safety, availability and maintainability of the developed systems
– to be able to make reliable financial/time estimations
– to be able to manage the changes in a quick and efficient way

Standards shall be restructured, rationalized and definitely decreased in number.

The software tools, to support essential and high-leverage methodologies, assume a big relevance for the above goals, to help the design teams to grow up in capability maturity.

OUR PROPOSAL

We propose a suite of software tools to manage the whole project life cycle, in a very effective and costs-reducing way. How? Hereafter a quick presentation of the main points.

The classical Project Life Cycle, though theoretically correct, is very seldom fully applied: in normal projects, the requirements and system design documentation become quickly too heavy to follow the project at the required speed. Needs to change the user requirements occur after each project milestone (design review, shop test in simulation, integrated tests, acceptance tests). The correct changes management required a review of documentation each time. But the delivery/invoicing milestones often constrain to delay the documentation upgrade. The result is that documentation often remain backward, wrt the developed project: it costed a lot, but is useless for the product maintenance.

Many corporates never really passed from waterfall to life cycle models

  

The Reiterative Project Life Cycle is not different, in principle, from the classic Project Life Cycle: the phases are the same, as well as the foreseen documents and activities. The only difference is that the RPLC explicitely foresees to cycle on the design-prototyping phases until customer full satisfaction.

The experience, and the most advanced standard methodologies (i.e. the Capability Maturity  Model), showed that to work according to the above model is possible only using proper software tools.

Andromeda owns a remarkable design experience in the field of the process control systems, in the aerospace and infrastructural sectors, for human life support systems, where reliability and safety are primary requisite.

STEPS is a suite of tools to manage the whole project life cycle, in reiterative way, on relational database: from the requirements definition, to the definition of test procedures, to the test execution and problems annotation, up to the final acceptance test, tracing all the intermediate levels. The system implements a total online traceability matrice, and automatically (re)produce the whole documentation, already formatted in MSWord.

Thanks to the power of the 4^th generation relational database, such a system allows to analyze and to manage the changes with extreme facility and rapidity, maintaining upgraded the project documentation and the traceability matrices, very efficiently and time saving, up to the end of the project.

STEPS automatically produces the following documents, in Office format:

objects	documents	Office
REQUIREMENTS	Requirements Documents, Children vs. Parents Requirements Traceability Matrices; Orphans and Childless Requirements.	MSWord, MSExcel
RISKS DOCUMENT	Risks associated to requirements. Each risk’s mitigation action, assessment before and after mitigation.	MSWord, MSExcel
TEST PROCEDURES	Test Cases vs. covered Requirements Traceability Matrices, Requirements not covered by any Test Case, complete Test Procedures documents.	MSWord
PROBLEMS AND OPEN ISSUES	Problems Report (in compact and extended shape); Problems traceability vs. Test cases and violated Requirements. Export to any MSExcel format, with automated check and evidence of near and violated deadlines, replanning history, number of days delay.	MSWord, MSExcel, MSProject
TEST REPORTS	Test reports of the executed test procedures, complete of: compiled test steps (Pass/ProbID), Problems Report, Test Summary	MSWord
EVENTS AND MINUTES OF MEETING	Events Report (in compact and extended shape).	MSWord, MSExcel
DOCUMENTS	Documentation Tree, Table of the Applicable Documents, Table of the Referred Documents.	MSWord
I/O SIGNALS	I/O Lists and Terminal Lists	MSWord, MSExcel
PLANNING	Activities and open issues	MSProject

THE STEPS CLIENT-SERVER ARCHITECTURE

THE TOOLS COMPOSING STEPS

 

 

 

 

 STEPS VS. OTHER COMMERCIAL TOOLS

 

STANDARDS:	STEPS is compliant with the following international standards: – for system & software engineering ISO 12207 (ex MIL498); ISO 15288; ISO 15504; NASA SP-2007-6105; ISPE GAMP; – for risk management ISO 31000; ISO/IEC 16085; ESA ECSS-M-ST-80C; SEI CMU NDIA 2009; PMI A Guide To Manage Project Risks And Opportunities; – for quality management FDA CPG; AS  9100; ESA ECSS-Q-ST-80C; ESA ECSS-Q-ST-40C; US DoD MIL-STD-882D; – for PROJECT MANAGEMENT NASA NPR-7120.5D; PMI PMBOK Guide
CONTACTS:	email: info@ase-ltd.co.uk
REQUEST US A TRIAL LICENSE:	STEPS TRIAL 30 DAYS (English) NOTE: STEPS was tested so far on Windows 7, interfacing Microsoft Office 2010 (Words and Excel) and Microsoft Project 2007