Improving on Process Improvement: Are we Making Progress?
Richard Léveillé
Sr. Mgr. Corporate Quality & Initiatives
Synopsys Inc.

Introduction:

Synopsys is one of the largest software development companies with over $1.2 billion in revenue (FY07). Synopsys is the leading provider of electronic design automation (EDA) software and services used to design complex integrated circuits (ICs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and systems-on-chips (SoCs) for the global semiconductor and electronics industries.

With more than 2,500 developers worldwide, processes and best-practices in software development are key to success. Recognizing that fact, a corporate quality initiative was created with the objective of measuring and improving software development processes.

This presentation offers a practical perspective in defining, implementing and rolling out a method to encourage and sustain process improvement. The method offers a measurable approach and a path to success based on Synopsys's experience.

Participants will learn:

  • Real-life experience in measuring and rolling out corporate-wide process improvement
  • Lessons learned for a corporate-wide process improvement program
  • Methodology and Metric used to measure process improvement

Outline:

  • The Ultimate Objective
    • What are the objectives of the corporate initiatives? What is the business rationale?
  • The Challenge: Blending process improvement to the corporate culture
    • Understanding the environment where the process improvement initiative will be promoted is essential its success. Developers and management not always relate to the various process improvement models.
  • Method, metric, and cycle of improvement
    • Describe the methodology used to evaluate the level of processes, the metric collected to quantify progress, and the overall process improvement cycle for the Product Teams
  • “3rd time is the charm”, they said
    • Reaching a workable model truly adapted to the needs of the company required iterations. How did the method evolve to its current form? What did we learn? What are the key factors of success?
  • Results thus far
    • Presenting real-life results obtained and its effect
  • The Next Step
    • What will be the focus moving forward to keep the momentum and improve on our own process?

Biography: