This paper describes a success story in large-scale global systems & software development. Carried out at several company locations and associated supplier sites, we describe how we manage and develop a complex embedded product in a global dynamic environment. Main acting locations are at Germany and China. Organizational key success factors include very experienced project management team, partnership-based collaboration in cross-functional teams across locations, and well-defined roles & responsibilities on all project levels. Sociological key factors include frequent cross-site visits on engineering and management level, cross-cultural trainings, and high process and quality focus of the whole project team. Technical key factors include feature-driven and timeboxing based iterative process, effective multi-site tools for configuration control, for change management, for joint asynchronous reviews, for software integration and release, and full traceability of all product changes. Evidence by some process measurements is provided supporting our view that our project is very successful.

There are three interdependent factors that drive our software development processes: interval, quality and cost. As market pressures continue to demand new features ever more rapidly, the challenge is to meet those demands while increasing, or at least not sacrificing, quality. One advantage of defect prevention as an upstream quality improvement practice is the beneficial effect it can have on interval: higher quality early in the process results in fewer defects to be found and repaired in the later parts of the process, thus causing an indirect interval reduction.