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The jointly developed application lifecycle management solution will be the first to help companies accomplish embedded software engineering objectives by integrating project management, requirements management, architecture, coding, software configuration management testing and documentation. This ALM tool automates and enforces processes between the stages of development, manage relationships between assets produced by the software development project, and offer transparency and metrics through reports on development as it progresses.

These strengths are aimed at avoiding the consequences outlined in recent news stories which reported that Toyota and Volvo have recalled vehicles due to software failures, while software-intensive projects in aerospace and defense overrun budgets and schedule by a factor of two and deliver only 60% of the expected functionality. Such poor results stem from a number of design challenges that this ALM product is designed to prevent:


* Failure to track requirements through design, analysis and into testing stages, resulting in 85% of all software errors and a lack of transparency and metrics
* Organizational isolation prevents software developers from discussing system integration issues with mechanical or electronic engineers; requirements repositories are separate from most development and verification activities
* Most ALM project tools are geared for IT implementations and fail to support many of the critical objectives of embedded application project


Such failures in process represent a high risk of defective applications being deployed or of significant cost overrun since correction of software defects identified in later lifecycle stages have resulted in a cost multiplier of 900 times!

“Software-driven advances offer the opportunity to meet customer demand for more functionality and improve the quality of products,” noted Baldo Rincón, Managing Director of Visure Solutions. “However, failure to manage requirements through the development process lowers quality and productivity, increasing development costs and time to market. Our strength in Requirements Definition and Management will ensure the updates and changes that are part of any software development lifecycle will automatically be fed into the requirements traceability, analysis and testing—the competencies that LDRA brings to the table.”

“Our customers, particularly in the safety-, mission- and security-critical spaces, daily face the challenge of certifying software that is becoming increasing complex and unwieldy,” noted Bill StClair, LDRA Technical Evangelist. “We hope to provide them with a solution that coherently connects the extensive details inherent in an embedded application with an overall system perspective so that developers and managers alike can collaborate, communicate and work together effectively.”

LDRA and Visure plan to announce their integrated ALM solution in Hall 10, Stand 316 at Embedded World 2010 taking place in Nürnberg, Germany from March 2–4, 2010.