DOES US 2021

Siemens is a company with 174 years of tradition, developing innovative technical products and solutions with the highest quality standards. But the world is changing. Digitization, AI and cloud computing are ubiquitous. Software is becoming an important differentiator and is driving many core aspects of our corporate strategy. As a result, the application of Continuous Delivery and DevOps concepts is becoming more and more relevant to our business.

One of the biggest hurdles in an industrial enterprise to take advantage of the tremendous business opportunities that Continuous Delivery and DevOps enable – how to deal with milestones - can be overcome with a Continuous Quality Assurance approach. In industrial enterprises, software delivery requires much more than just working software. To formally release a change and deploy it into production requires many more non-software artifacts that cannot be covered by the Continuous Integration tool chain, no matter how sophisticated it is. However, using the classic milestone approach is no longer an option, as this limits the deployment frequency to values that are not even close to the desired target. Therefore, a radical rethinking of the release process is required.

In this talk, we will present how Siemens Building Technologies benefited from a new approach to analyzing and tracking non-software quality criteria by introducing a Continuous Conformance approach. We applied the "Green to Green" and "Shift Left" mantra not only to software, but also to non-software artifacts. Combined with a Continuous Integration pipeline, this allowed us to establish a Continuous Quality Assurance flow. This novel approach allows Siemens Building Technologies to take advantage of the many opportunities provided by continuous enhancements of their cloud-based solutions while maintaining its industrial quality standards. We will also outline, how our internal networks driven by key experts helps to speed up this radical paradigm shift and make it a success across the many different businesses within Siemens.