E-MANAGEMENT AND QUALITY ASSURANCE

When control system development is done, one might ask: 'Does it work?', 'Who implemented this component?', 'How much time had he spent doing it?' and 'Was the component implemented on time?' In academically-minded development environments, such as the KGB Team (1) of the Jozef Stefan Institute, the usual answers to these questions would be: 'It works just fine?', 'Given the colorful appearance of the buttons I'd say it was John?', 'Does it matter?', and 'No, but it is not a problem, since the whole project was late anyway.' Due to the lack of up-front planning and accurate progress tracking, there usually remains little time for testing the control system thoroughly and documenting it comprehensively. Consequentially, only the author truly understands his work, and is, thus, irreplaceable. But what if he leaves the team? Who will take up his responsibilities? When a part of the KGB Team separated from Jozef Stefan Institute to start its own business as Cosylab (2), failure to do things right, well, on time and on budget had immediate effects on the paychecks. Thus, we were forced to introduce a low-overhead, user-friendly e-management system, as well as a quality assurance system, through which the processes, roles and quality controls within the company are formalized. Experience with both of these is shared in this paper. We are relying on Open Source tools, such as Request Tracker (3), Internet Calendar (4), CVS (5) and MrProject (6). We have developed CosyDoc, an XML-based system for writing documentation, which allows us to write living documents more efficiently. Atop of that, we are defining our software and hardware development processes, which are based on Rational Unified Process (7), Microsoft Solutions Framework, Capability Maturity Model, ISO 9126 (software quality characteristics) and ISO 9000 Tick IT (quality assurance).