Early identification of bottlenecks in very large scale system of systems software development

Abstract

SUMMARYSystem of systems are of high complexity and for each system many different requirements are implemented in parallel. Systems are developed with some degree of managerial independence, but later on have to work together. In this situation many requirements are written, implemented, and tested in parallel for different systems that are to be integrated. This makes identifying bottlenecks challenging and visualizations often used on project level (such as Kanban Boards or Burndown Charts) have to be extended/complemented to cope with the increased complexity. In response to these challenges the contributions of this study are to propose (1) a visualization for early identification and proactive removal of bottlenecks; (2) a visualization to check on the success of bottleneck resolution; and (3) to provide an industry evaluation of the visualizations in a case study of a system of systems developed at Ericsson AB in Sweden. The feedback by the practitioners showed that the visualizations were perceived as useful in improving throughput and lead-time. The quantitative analysis showed that the visualizations were able in identifying bottlenecks and showing improvements or the lack thereof. Based on the qualitative and quantitative data collected we conclude that the visualizations are useful in bottleneck identification and resolution.

Kanban in software engineering: A systematic mapping study

“…Measure and manage flow: There are five commonly known techniques that are used to manage flow: (i) value stream maps, (ii) Kanban board, (iii) cumulative flow diagrams (CFDs), (iv) burn-down charts, and (v) line of balance status charts (Anderson, 2010;Petersen et al, 2014;Mujtaba et al, 2010). The quality of flow is measured using four key metrics: queue size, throughput rate, cycle time, and lead time (Power and Conboy, 2015;Reinertsen, 2009).…”

“…For example, value stream maps, cumulative flow diagrams (CFDs), and burn-down charts (c.f. Petersen et al, 2014) are also used by software engineering teams, as well as metrics such as cycle-time, lead time, and throughput (c.f. Reinertsen, 2009, Power and.…”

Information Flows at Inter-team Boundaries in Agile Information Systems Development

“…There is extensive research on agile software development principles and practices [2,3,5,16,22] but less research is done on inter-team communication. Inter-team knowledge sharing in agile software development are still in the rise [10,25,26].…”

FLOW-assisted value stream mapping in the early phases of large-scale software development

“…It is stated that the company on the basis of the Lean concepts of VSM and queues developed these methods and measures. With a similar intention as Staron and Wilhelm, Petersen et al [8] have proposed and evaluated visualizations to identify and resolve bottlenecks in the development process and to follow-up on the degree of success of the resolutions. During this study, the time-line analysis (delineating the productive vs. waiting times) and cumulative flow diagrams were used to analyze the process.…”

“…While the earlier work on identification of bottlenecks by Petersen et al [9] and [8] uses the typical visualizations used in a value stream analysis, but it does not use the VSM as a framework to guide the improvement activity in the organization.…”