Scaling Agile on Company Level With a Fully Integrated PTC Codebeamer

00:00 Hello and welcome to this first session after lunch. The first breakout session after lunch on Scaling Agile on a company level in a fully integrated Codebeamer long name. But as we as we learned this morning from Jim's keynote, Agile is important. Agile in product development is important. And we're going to we're going to talk about this for the next 30, 20, 30 minutes. I'm not alone on stage. I'm not sure if do you actually need an introduction? Not really. I mean, everyone in the PTC world knows Tim Brennan,

00:33 ALM manager from Vienna. I've been around. How long? Decades, probably. Yeah. We're not the youngest anymore. I know. I'm getting gray hair as well. And I'm Dominic Castle. I'm the CEO of Ninja Systems. We are obviously partnered, working together with with Vienna on many cases and obviously we also PTC partner. Otherwise kind of wouldn't be wouldn't be here. So the next 25 minutes ish, we're going to walk you basically through part of the Vienna ALM history and where they're standing now.

01:05 You will learn and understand why looking just at ALM, especially when it comes to an agile way of working in an enterprise, Agile way of working is not enough. Show you an example, a little video on it, and then hopefully when you walk out here at 130, you have a bit of a better understanding of what might be coming there, what Agile brings for the future, what what potential is in there in, in looking at enterprise, Agile and not only at Team Agile. And with this it's it's you team for the next few slides.

01:40 All right. Well, good afternoon. Just as a quick introduction, my name is Tim Brennan. I am the ALM manager at Veoneer. I have been with Veoneer and Autoliv for the last 22 years and I have 30 years in software development and the software development process and ALM tooling. What I was asked to do was present the history of Codebeamer at Veoneer. How did we get to Codebeamer? How did we deploy it and where we're at today?

02:10 So I'll start with back in 2018, Veoneer undergoes a push for modernization of our tool chain. We'd been using the same tool chain for over a decade. The end users were clamoring for modern interfaces, better performance, the standard set of things that we always look for. The organization, they went out and they established a review team of our advanced end users and our management and they set off on

02:41 a six month quest to find the next generation ALM system. And they focused on having a single backbone for our cycle. So if you look at the standard V cycle V and you're pretty much follows that we wanted a tool to backbone that system. We wanted requirements. Requirements management. We wanted the design, we wanted the implementation, the unit testing, the validation and verification testing all from within one platform.

03:17 So after a year of looking at all the commercial. Solutions out on the market. We kind of settled in on Codebeamer and we did so because it's. The identified, modernized features. It had all those sets. It distributes ownership of your access to your teams. Your teams now control their data and who accesses it. It's got a modernized interface. It gives us good performance on worldwide collaboration venues as teams in Asia,

03:51 Europe and North America. And often those teams are in all three locations at once. So we had to have online collaboration with great performance. The selection process was basically we went out to the to the web and did our research and with every good company does. And we found all the commercial products in this space. And started analyzing them. And the first question a lot of you will have will be. Does Jira come into that space?

04:21 And the answer is, quite frankly, no. Jira is a great task manager, but out of the box it does not give you requirements engineering. It does not give you test case engineering. You have to add those to the platform as a plugin. So everything we read at the time, said Girard, does not qualify as an ALM platform. So we took the platforms that. We're listed and. Put them in.

04:51 Put them in the big pot of review. And this team of engineers and managers spent months reviewing. These tools and they didn't ask me, the IT guy, a single question. And that's important. It should not pick your tool chain. It does not own that data. It manages it. So as the IT guy. I did not want to be part of that decision. My organization picked Codebeamer and when they were done picking it,

05:24 I thought it was the best choice they could have made. Our initial development and deployment. We established the initial platform, started working on a what we call the corporate template. Codebeamer gives you this feature where you can build a template and your teams can reuse that template. We built that template based on ISO standards and the way of working of the organization. And we established what we were calling at the time, one veneer, one process. So we wanted all of our engineering teams to work the same way.

05:57 We built the template to support that need. So our initial customizations were bridges and our legacy requirements platform doors as a big secret. We bridged into our existing Rvns source integrity platform so we could reuse the the good features it provides. We had import and exports of all the data branchings and creating custom trackers. And we put all that into the global template.

06:29 And as we did that, Dominic's team at Nanga was a huge help in getting all that done. We had scalability issues. We had to design these templates. We had to build custom trackers for reviews and documents and to establish risk. And Dominic's team helped us in that. They were experts with the tool and they reduced our development time significantly. Deployment. You can see here how we deployed the tool. You can see the success rate.

07:02 If you look at the way companies deploy tools , I don't know of very many tools, at least in my career, where. User accounts rose at that. Level that quickly. We got this tool and what was it, 2018, 2019 And by 2020 we were establishing the major milestones where we were building the pilot servers. We were getting our first beta. Team into the platform, using it at a production level.

07:33 And then we built the production server, released it to the end users and you can see the results. And today we have 7000 active accounts in the system spanning 533 projects. And in those projects there are, what is it, close to 10 million requirements in issues. So the system is very well in use. And it's in my 30 year career, probably the most successful tool deployment I've been a part of.

08:06 However, there was one more thing we needed to get. As good as this deployment was. Our teams. Needed expanded agile views. We created a Pi team was a project increment. I'm not up on all the acronyms every day anymore. Our project increment team decided they wanted detailed collaborative, agile tooling.

08:36 And as good as Codebeamer is. Those features didn't exist in the tool. So we went out, went over to Nanga and said, Hey, can you help us build this Agile solution? And that's where Dominic and his team came in. With Codebeamer PTC Codebeamer. So, so far and Tim just addressed one really important point. Obviously a tool is built for a certain scope and it has it has a strength where it needs to focus on and the tool is never a one single tool,

09:08 is never the only tool in a bigger organization. So an extremely simplified way of of how the IT infrastructure looks is you look at it Codebeamer at the center holding all the requirements management data and test management data, as Tim just described, integrated into a PLM into a collaborative tool such as such as Atlassian products and of course all the more specific tools, test automation tools and so on. And then and then the main point for,

09:39 for today's presentation actually integrated into an enterprise agile platform. So if we, if we drill down this way a little bit further, as Tim described before, obviously they wanted to work Agile and Codebeamer is a fantastic tool to work Agile on in an Agile methodology on a on a team level. It it does its job amazing, but it's not an enterprise platform for enterprise, for, for, for agile planning.

10:11 It's it lacks certain capabilities of the, of the standards of the safe standards that, that are more and more introduced. And that's where another solution up to your target process came in. That's what what Vernier decided on after looking at multiple solutions and well that's also again where we came in. We we built an integration on this and and basically helped helped resolve 111 functional gap.

10:41 At this point I'm going to show you a video about the integration and we'll be narrating on it in in a little bit after this after this slide, just to set the scope a little bit. So you're going to you're going to see an integration where you have immediate syncing of of objects between between the two, between the two tools. You have prioritization capabilities, you have configuration capabilities in that in that other tool. And you have all the Pi program increment, by the way,

11:11 planning activities and capacity planning activities that you need for, for an enterprise level agile solution. You will see Codebeamer on the right side of the screen. Right. Half of the screen every time. And a target process on the left side of the screen. And I hope you can see it from there. We already have objects in both tools, features and user stories. As you can see, there is a little example of a typo being corrected in in in a second.

11:45 And you see the update on on the other side of the tool immediately. Here we go. And then you see you see the prioritization of of the features already based on w JSF standard. So this is this is already already done. And then the whole the pie pre planning basically starts. So we already have the pies and, and the, the increments, the sprints in the systems.

12:16 But as you can see, they're empty. So we're, we're looking, we're looking at the pre planning and filling up our our backlog over here, including the capacity planning. So you move them over. You see that the capacity is is over the actual capacity. So you have to have to change a few of the of the settings. All this is, is again, all this is done live, all the data is synced automatically back to Codebeamer the whole time. And as you see now, yeah, it's, it's there already. The pre planning is basically done.

12:50 So I have the backlog for my for my program increment. It's, it's all set up. And then depending on of course how the organization is to do this in different, in different teams and in different roles, then you do the actual pie planning, you use the backlog, put it into into the containers for for the team to be executed and to be planned into the, into each, each pie. And on this level is where the enterprise comes in, really, because here you see all the other teams from other parts of the organization working in an agile way, working on this product development,

13:22 and you have the increased visibility. What they are doing you see here during the planning phase as well in which increment they're implementing, which feature or which user story you see dependencies and, and can resolve dependencies can resolve blocking issues and so on. Includes we have, as an example in here we have the Jira team included, for example, that works on on other parts of the product development as a target process team. I think in the example as well. So picture this in in a standard with thousands of people working there with

13:54 different departments, working there in product development hardware as well as software as again, as Jim mentioned this this morning, also hardware development is is going agile. This is where the visibility comes in. This is where you actually keep control over over the data, over the development process. And at the very end of after all the thinking, we will see that again data is updated on on the Codebeamer, on the Codebeamer end and the normal daily work for the Codebeamer users,

14:28 for the for the engineers working in that in that software development space basically goes goes on. And just to add a little color to that demonstration, the vendor setup was completely customized and this platform allows us to customize our views. Our pie teams came in and they said, Well, we want a screen that's got all the different data sets in it. In the middle of it there was a Kanban board and on the side was information and news by the project and they want to have meetings where all 20 people in

15:01 the weekly review can edit that Kanban board and that screen all at once. And this tool allows us to do that. So I mean that was and that was key when we got the requirement for this Agile add on, the number one thing was collaboration. 20 people had to be in on a meeting, collaborating all at the same time on the same Kanban board with charts and handwritten notes, anything else that they could put on that same screen.

15:32 So let's talk about what's the benefits of a fully integrated Codebeamer. Right. You get increased transparency because now management, whether you're an end user, a simple end user, a software engineer, right And there's nothing simple about software engineering. That's a bad way to say that. But whether you're software engineering or whether you're the CEO of the company. These dashboards built in target process give you a complete view of the project. So your transparency is is off the chart, right? You get reduced manual effort.

16:07 I don't have to always tell 20 people the same thing. I get them in the collaboration space, they go in, they work off the same screen, so reduces manual effort. You get faster data updates because everybody at one time in the same meeting is updating screens all at once, right? And you're freeing up time from your engineers so they can focus on. I always my entire career has been spent walking that line between how much time do

16:38 I have software engineering spending in these data platforms, documenting for the company versus how much time are these software engineers writing code? Right Every time I have to send him into Codebeamer or Ravens or whatever tool I'm taking away from them writing software, I want them writing software. That's what they're here to do. So freed up time for engineers to focus on more complex topics. That's writing software.

17:09 You want your engineers 15% of the time doing company work, 85% of the time writing code. That's my target. I don't know that I ever get there, but that's what I focus on. And if you ask us in what a few weeks or a few months, probably, then this these more generic lines of of increasing transparency and so on will be replaced by numbers. There is obviously an ROI that that can be calculated and will be calculated. I mean, that's the the undertaking. While we while we did this, why Vienna asked us to help or why we did this together,

17:41 because there has to be a business benefit, obviously in quality and in money savings. Agreed. And then if you look at some of the vendor specific items, advanced Gantt charts, that's big. That's a pet peeve of mine. And there's a few of you in the room that you've heard me say Gantt charts and Codebeamer need a lot of work, right? They don't have the detail I want now. Just because I want it doesn't mean it should be there. And maybe I'm wrong, but I get the advanced Gantt charts that I want now, right?

18:11 Configurable dashboards. My program managers in the organization don't want to have to spend a lot of time. Learning how to build configurable dashboards It's a little bit easier with this platform. The Visualize Agile data from a program incremental view. That's huge. That's the biggest part. Every time our API team goes from one facility to the next. Training teams on how to use the API platform built into target process.

18:43 I get positive feedback and then easy to use visualization again, it's Codebeamer doesn't sell itself as an agile solution. Codebeamer sells itself as ALM, so the finer points of Agile are not included and it was never meant to be in Codebeamer That's not a slap at Codebeamer that's not a complaint. It simply is the case that this is an ALM platform. You want advanced agile, you have to build it. And this solution became, at least for Vienna,

19:15 a great way to give us advanced agile in a quick, transparent, easy to use way. Yeah, that's that's a nice way of, of concluding it. Also what you, what you said before there is solutions. There is a products for for certain for certain spaces, for certain levels as we understand systems of systems and parts of systems and and as development is being distributed, obviously that that also is true for Agile.

19:45 So you have Agile on team level, Fantastic. With Codebeamer, you have enterprise level Agile, that's where Codebeamer ends. There is something else comes in and where you where you leverage all the benefits. So we hope this within the few minutes we had today, this this became clear and that obviously integrating and looking at the bigger picture of of solutions in the product development is is really key to being successful. Not one tool will will resolve everything but a proper process

20:18 and integrated tool process will resolve most topics all of them ideally not sure if we ever reached 100% , but. But yeah, with this. Well then it's ongoing, right? It's it's a tool that's going to evolve with your organization. Right? Yeah. With this, we're at the end. Thank you so much. We're here for. For questions. So if you have questions now, you actually we were told you have to walk up to the microphones because this session is being recorded. Otherwise they wouldn't hear the questions.

20:50 And if you don't want to ask questions now, if there's none right now, then feel free to approach us. The slide deck is uploaded, by the way, so you can use our contact details anytime afterwards. And. And well, grab us. We are here for the next two more days. Thank you.