Schneider Electric, a global specialist in energy management, uses Symphony, a Product Life Management (PLM) application, for the development of more than 200,000 of its products. With thousands of daily users, this application is strategic. “If Symphony goes down, these thousands of products can no longer evolve!” explains Laurent Grenet, Symphony’s Application Owner.

Application quality is a major challenge, but the cost became too great, particularly with test phases involving up to seven people and too many iterations pushing back deadlines and reducing responsiveness. The decision was therefore made to strengthen quality in the development process for the Symphony application in order to be proactive upstream of acceptance.

In the first phase, Schneider Electric considered several competing solutions to evaluate the relevance of their quality diagnostic results on the Symphony application and each solution’s ability to integrate into the development process with specific improvement plans.
“With the Quality Cockpit, Kalistick gave us the most pertinent results, with impressive speed and usability,” says Laurent Grenet.

With the Quality Cockpit, a detailed improvement plan could be put into place in accordance with the project priorities. To invest in improvements with a clear ROI, the plan has three key points:

• The targeted correction of bugs located in subsets of the application that no longer change,
• Larger corrections in changing modules,
• Stricter quality rules for all new development.
  

The Cockpit’s indicators and dashboards show the plan’s progress. The results show development levels much better and also serve as a guide to better target testing activities.

Thus, the number of validation cycles has been reduced to only three, and “we were able to fix bugs that we knew about but were previously unable to explain,” states Guy Dugué.

“If I were to start all over, we would have called upon Kalistick in the early development, which would have allowed us to avoid the costs and issues that became unsolvable,” says Guy Dugué.

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