In the ever-evolving landscape of modern businesses, finding the perfect software solution tailored to your organization’s needs is crucial. However, navigating the multitude of options can be daunting. That’s where DataSkill steps in, offering comprehensive demos that showcase the capabilities of IBM software and guide businesses towards identifying the ideal solutions for their requirements. In this blog post, we’ll delve into some of the key capabilities of the IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management platform that were explored during a recent demonstration provided by DataSkill to a customer in the medical industry.
Unlocking Efficiency with Design Planning
Dashboards serve as a central hub for effective collaboration and project management, empowering teams to excel. In the realm of IBM ELM, these dashboards offer customization options, allowing businesses to tailor them to their projects, teams, or individual users. With real-time updates, the displayed information is always current and accurate. The customizable widgets provide a variety of options, including links, tables, and graphs, enabling quick and clear access to the most relevant data. This level of flexibility and efficiency ensures that you stay in control of the information that matters most to you.
Practice Content acts as a comprehensive library of guidance for specific workflows or standards. It documents processes and equips engineers with practical guidance mapped to the objectives within the standard. By conforming to these objectives, engineers ensure compliance with the standard. The library presents expandable categories that unveil high-level objectives and detailed workflows. When a category is expanded, a prescriptive delivery process is revealed, complete with activities and tasks designed to meet the objectives. Customizability is key, allowing you to use your own process or adapt it as needed. The guidance goes beyond documentation by providing instructions on executing tasks within specific tools, known as tool mentors. This holistic approach to process guidance enhances efficiency and empowers engineers to excel.
Planning – to comply with IEC62304 and ISO13485 you have to have a plan. The Design Planning dashboard within IBM ELM incorporates various methods to provide a clear view of project status. Development plans, solution roadmaps, and traceability graphs work in harmony to offer an encompassing perspective. Widgets can be expanded to reveal more details, and the solution roadmap provides a hierarchical structure, starting with high-level epics and cascading down to individual capabilities and features There are many ways to interact with the data, for example you can switch to a classic Kanban view if you prefer, allowing you to easily move work items through the process by dragging and dropping them across different columns.
Optimizing Product Requirements
Requirements Management – lies at the heart of successful product development. Within the IBM ELM platform, the Product Requirements Document acts as a comprehensive repository for end user requirements, regulatory requirements, software requirements, and more. Its rich editing environment accommodates pictures, rich text, tables, and other elements, fostering clarity and precision. The document’s hierarchical structure enables collapsing sections for an overview or expanding them for more detailed insights. A crucial aspect of effective requirements management is granularity, treating each sketch, requirement, and heading as an independent and self-contained piece, promoting traceability and facilitating simultaneous editing by multiple users. This intelligent approach eliminates the pitfalls of manual copy-pasting, allowing for efficient artifact reuse across different documents.
Change Management enables projects to be placed under change control, where changes need to be made as part of a change set. This ensures that changes are properly documented and managed. With automatic tracking and logging of all changes, an audit trail is established, providing a comprehensive record of each change, including the nature of the change, who made it, and when it occurred. The platform streamlines the change approval process, manages the impact of changes, and maintains the integrity of the project.
Traceability is traditionally maintained in separate documents, such as spreadsheets, which is manual, error-prone, costly, and quickly becomes outdated. However, in the IBM ELM platform, traceability is seamlessly integrated within artifacts in the web browser. You can easily view the product requirements and the downstream system requirements that satisfy them. Two noteworthy software features, Rich Hover and Link Validity, enhance the traceability experience. Rich Hover allows engineers to view key information about linked artifacts without navigating away, saving valuable time and effort. Link Validity highlights suspect links resulting from changes made to linked artifacts, ensuring the accuracy and reliability of traceability.
Strengthening Design Input
Requirements Quality Assessment (RQA) takes requirements management to new heights by harnessing the power of AI. By leveraging Watson Natural Language Processing, RQA evaluates requirements against predefined rules, detecting potential issues such as ambiguity, incompleteness, or poor structure. RQA provides scores and detailed insights into the issues found, empowering less experienced requirement writers to improve their skills. By identifying and addressing quality issues at an early stage, businesses save time, reduce costs, and enable domain
experts to focus on reviewing requirement intent rather than fixing inconsistencies.
Reviews of requirements are necessitated under ISO 13485. The IBM ELM platform provides links to review work items, which offer detailed information about approvals and associated problems. Collaboration is facilitated through comment sections and assignment capabilities for resolving problems. The platform also enables artifact comparison, making it easy to identify changes and approve them. The closure of a review work item is contingent upon the approval and closure of all associated child work items, ensuring a comprehensive and thorough review process.
Risk Management is a critical component of any industry. The IBM ELM platform offers comprehensive Risk Management capabilities through Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) and Operational Hazard Analysis. FMEA and operational hazard analysis both examine failure modes, effects, and causes. The distinction is that operational hazard analysis focuses on potential issues due to incorrect product usage, while FMEA identifies possible failures in product design components. The IBM ELM Platform can streamline reporting by automatically generating a comprehensive Risk Management File that combines both Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) and Operational Hazard Analysis. This consolidated document simplifies the reporting process, providing a holistic view of risk management.
Design Output
Design Verification is a crucial step in the development process. Within the System Requirements document, IBM ELM provides a view that displays design elements satisfying the requirements. Gap analysis and link validity are available, this time between the requirements and the design. Again, Rich Hover is available and enables requirements engineers to view linked design artifacts without having to open or navigate a model. These models encompass architecture, functional analysis, behavior, and more. They can be executed to validate system requirements or even generate production-quality source code for software-level models. The Design Verification Tab on the Project Dashboard provides additional analysis options, including traceability views, tables, and coverage metrics graphs, delivering comprehensive insights.
Streamlining Design Validation
Test Plans play a pivotal role in organizing and executing testing activities. They provide a structured workflow, ensuring that all test management steps are completed seamlessly. Just like other elements in the IBM ELM platform, Test Plans are highly customizable to adapt to your unique processes. They include various section types, such as data storage and text-based sections, replacing traditional word documents. The Risk Assessment section facilitates collaborative risk assessment, leaving a valuable audit trail. Within the Test Plan, all Test Cases and associated Test Scripts are listed, enabling efficient management and execution. Test Case Results and raised defects can be conveniently reviewed within the Test Plan, streamlining the defect tracking process.
Test Results offer detailed information about each test, allowing reviewers to assess the steps performed and the corresponding results. In case of test failure, testers can effortlessly create defects that are automatically linked to relevant testing artifacts and the validated requirement, ensuring a smooth defect tracking process.
Metrics and Reports available on the Design Validation tab of the general dashboard provide valuable insights into the validation process. By generating graphs that showcase the number of tests passed or failed, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of the progress and effectiveness of your validation efforts. These graphs can be generated at a global level or broken down by test plan or environment, providing you with a detailed analysis of your validation progress.
IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) offers a comprehensive and integrated approach to systems and software engineering, revolutionizing the way we manage the entire engineering lifecycle. By leveraging IBM ELM, businesses can empower their teams, enhance collaboration, and streamline communication, leading to improved decision-making, increased productivity, and higher product quality.
To witness the full power of IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management in action, sign up for a full demonstration video through our Monthly Solution Spotlight page. DataSkill, in partnership with IBM ELM, is committed to supporting your journey towards success, whether you seek to optimize requirements gathering, improve traceability, or enhance overall project management.
Remember, the right software solution tailored to your organization’s needs is within reach, and DataSkill and IBM ELM are here to empower your business with the tools and expertise required to thrive in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape