Enlarged design documents at development with short delivery time
The company develops embedded software for payment processing that requires high quality. In recent years, it has faced demands for faster releases—about once a month—driven by the diversification of payment methods and increasingly complex system requirements.
Previously, design specifications duplicated upstream design content to ensure traceability. Furthermore, design changes often led to the addition of dedicated sections summarizing the modifications, making it difficult to maintain the specifications in order according to the table of contents and causing the design structure to break down. Under these conditions, updating specifications manually could no longer keep pace, creating challenges in development efficiency and quality maintenance. Additionally, the difficulty of tracking changes within specifications and unclear connections between deliverables across phases presented barriers to understanding for new and less-experienced team members.
Given this background, improving the consistency of design assets and traceability became a key objective in order to support rapid development cycles and resolve the issue of bloated design specifications.
Only one tool for reproducing the design methods you have been using
Class diagrams were managed using a dedicated modeling tool, while documents were maintained in Word. Copying and pasting class diagrams from the modeling tool into Word frequently resulted in inconsistent design information.
With Next Design, a single tool can be customized to match the existing format of your design specifications, covering everything from diagrams to documents.
Improved Traceability
Traceability can now be recorded automatically during the design process, eliminating extra effort. Moreover, because cross-phase traceability is visualized at a glance through dedicated views, the relationship with upstream design deliverables is also made clear. This eliminates the need to reference upstream design deliverables manually and removes redundancies in design information.
Improved Consistency of Design Assets
Standardizing and unifying design content through metamodels has resulted in systematically organized design information.
Because the contents of the metamodels are displayed automatically in the table of contents, individual variations are prevented, and the design structure can be maintained even through repeated derivative development. This makes the exact areas that require modification during updates clearly identifiable.
We want to promote the efficiency of simple, high-load tasks by utilizing digitized design data. We plan to create our own extensions and first automate areas that can be immediately improved, such as filling in review minutes and checking for omissions in design content.
Customer's Voice
Design deliverables that previously consisted only of text information have undergone digital transformation!
Because we were able to customize the modeling tool to meet on-site needs using metamodel designs tailored to our business type, we successfully introduced it into our projects smoothly. We also look forward to future feature expansions.
Mr. Goto, Division 2, Nihon Techno Structure Co., LTD.
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