Maximizing Software Production & Quality with Minimum Staff using Clarity™ - A Real-World Case Study

Software development in today's world has many interesting challenges. Demand for Software Engineers is greater than ever, requiring software engineering staff to be used as efficiently as possible; software development continues to be an activity susceptible to inefficiency, risk and quality issues; and software maintenance challenges are expanding as languages and libraries increase in number and complexity, and software engineers move between companies. The Space Data Systems (SDS) software engineering organization at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI®) produced 33 production software products over a 20-year period with a staff averaging 6 software engineers and testers. During that time, SDS created and refined the Clarity software engineering process in order to produce highly reliable and maintainable software products for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the European Space Agency (ESA) and other customers. With Clarity, SDS raised its average effectiveness for the past six years to 95%, meaning that SDS spent 95% of its time creating new functions or expanding existing functions, as opposed to fixing bugs. Clarity maximizes staff effectiveness by implementing enough process by the right person at the right time to minimize software rework, without slowing core software development and testing activities. Through a system of product-independent checklists and forms, Clarity mitigates error propagation through the software lifecycle process, leveraging the Software Lead as the process executor, and leaving software engineers and software testers to do what they do best - produce quality software products.