Was everything tested before the product shipped? Were all requirements met? Are you sure? As product development explodes with complexity (and as requirements & tests evolve during development), many design teams struggle to answer these questions with confidence. Knowledge gaps in product development add risk. Never good—especially in regulated industries. But there’s more to it. For teams using Jira or spreadsheets or similar, answering these questions can take time and effort away from development. It can burden productivity and invites human error. Is there a better way? Watch this webinar to learn about: -Growing challenges of product development teams. -Ways to manage change, improve visibility throughout the lifecycle. -How traceability is becoming the linchpin for modern design teams. -Cost-effective tools to help simplify the complexity.

1. How to Handle Exploding Complexity in Product Development
NICO KRÜGER, CTO, HELIX ALM — PERFORCE SOFTWARE

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Presenter
Nico Krüger
CTO, Helix ALM
Perforce Software

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What We’ll Cover
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Challenges for Product Developers
How to Handle Modern Complexity
The Role of Development Tools

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Feel Like Development’s Getting More Complex?
Designs becoming
more intricate (57%)
92% reported their products increased in
complexity over the last five years. Leading causes?
More electronics
(47%)
New materials
(43%)
*engineering.com survey

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Why? Many, Many Moving Parts
• Products have more parts, pieces to
manage.
• Nature of collaboration is evolving —
from local to global.
• Development trends are changing —
Scrum, Kanban, Stage-Gate, etc.
• Teams often in different tooling
ecosystems.

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Effects on Development
• Requirements explosion.
• Multiple backlogs or boards.
• Bugs, features requests, roadmap.
• Increased volume of customer feedback.
• More specialist design inputs from more
sources.
• Communication silos & other challenges.
• Rising risk!
• Delivery delay!

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Things to Think About
Change
Who’s changing what & when?
When something changes, what else
does it impact?
Visibility
Can we see what we need to see to
make decisions & understand progress?
Risk
How do we assess risk when the
development picture is so large & fractured?
How do we document it?

8. How Do We Solve for Exploding Complexity?
Structure, Organization, Traceability.

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Structure Yields Traceability
• Structure approach to input gathering.
• Review & prioritize work items.
• Centralize for collaborative workspace.
• Break work into manageable chunks.
• When we organize & structure work
properly (put work items in folders,
ensure items have clear parent-child
structure) we can get traceability.

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Benefits of Traceability
Traceability Matrix
• Show progress towards work item
completion.
• Instant visibility into product risks.
• Can confirm that we’ve tested
everything, issues were resolved,
and requirements met.
• We can also prove compliance!

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Benefits of Traceability
Impact Analysis
Manage change by seeing how a
potential change affects tests,
issues, requirements — upstream &
downstream.
Root Cause Analysis
See, understand, & resolve the
causes of issues.
FMEA Analysis
Understand risk & make
informed decisions.

13. Tools & Tactics for Handling Complexity

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Common Development Tools
Yes, you can achieve a degree of traceability with
these, but difficult without adding risk.
Word Documents Excel Spreadsheets Atlassian Jira A Combination

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About Helix ALM
End-to-end lifecycle management with
easy traceability.
• Central tool to track status, progress
and reviews.
• Two-way Jira integration.
• Import/export from Word.
• Import/export to Excel.
• Requirement coverage.
• Use Agile, Waterfall, hybrid methods.
• Generate traceability matrix instantly.

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A Few Takeaways
• Development is changing, risk widening.
• Ask yourself… as product development
has changed over the past 5 years, how
have the team evolved alongside it?
• What areas are we strong in
(collaboration, documentation, etc.)?
Could use improvement?
• Find the right mix of tools to simplify.

17. How Are You Handling Complexity Today?

18. Q & A