Husqvarna, with its traditional lawn mowers and
other garden equipment, is a familiar name in Europe.
A lawn mower used to be a typical mechanical
product with no software included at all, but over
the last decade this product has been completely
transformed and many households now own a
robotic lawn mower that autonomously measures the
length of the grass, navigates around obstacles and
finds the borders without any difficulties, and even
returns automatically to its loading dock after having
completed its job. Forget the hard work and noise
of Saturday mornings and enjoy a nice lawn at any
moment of the year.
Question of scale
As in the case of Husqvarna, most product
innovations today are enabled through
software components, so it is no surprise that
software is the primary means of competitive
differentiation. Software plays a key role in the
digitalisation of many products that hitherto
were completely driven by electronics, so
scaling software in a controlled and efficient
way is crucial, and represents a major challenge
for organisations. The required transformations
are often driven by the technological evolution
of products, systems or services as well
as by how the business and the company
are organised. In many instances, existing
processes must be reshaped, and new best
practices and tools incorporated. The challenge
taken up by the ITEA project SCALARE, a joint
effort of industry and academia from five
countries, was how to support and enable
organisations in scaling their software capability
in a systematic, proactive way.
The SCALARE approach is unique in that it
provides a holistic vision for scaling in three
dimensions: software systems and services,
processes and methods, and business and
organisation. One of the key outcomes of
SCALARE is the Scaling Management Framework
(SMF), which organisations can use to assess
their software development capability and
plan their efforts to scale up that capability.
Companies in every domain face this need to
develop expertise in software development,
including those domains that we do not
traditionally consider to be software industries.
Besides the Husqvarna example, many other
domains rely increasingly on software to deliver
their functionality including the automotive
industry, with millions of lines of code running
on up to 100 ECUs in modern cars. The SMF is
an analytical tool that companies can use to
assess where they are and define the steps to
take to improve their software process.
Open source guide
The SMF and a rich set of case studies are reported in a practitioner-oriented
book ‘Scaling a Software Business’, published end of November 2017. The book
is freely available (https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319531151) as open
access under a Creative Commons license. It provides a gentle introduction to
how a variety of companies across several domains, including services and
consultancy, are able to scale up their software development capability, which
can be an inspiration for the whole European industry.
Building on the first book, which had been downloaded 16,000 times by mid
2020, the Swedish SCALARE project partners Addalot, Sony Mobile and Blekinge
Institute of Technology published a second book in 2018 based on the scaling
management framework from SCALARE, called ‘Principles for Industrial Open
Source’. This book contains a detailed description of an Open Source program
for industrials, and emphasises that the most innovative software is Open
Source and that it is possible to simultaneously support Open Source while
keeping parts of the code proprietary. The book presents Industrial Open Source,
industry-proven and standardised patterns for how to manage a large-scale Open
Source transformation. It can be used as a guide on your journey to successfully
transforming your organisation. In particular the book explains:
- How to create more business – through new and alternative revenue streams
- Why contributing is vital – to secure that value is added to your products
- Why compliance is a necessity – as a ticket to participate
The second SCALARE e-book can be downloaded from here.
Diverse and big impact
The project partners were able to benefit from
the SCALARE project in several ways. Husqvarna
had been undergoing a shift from mechanical
products to connected products with a service
offering (electronics and software) but until 2016
the products had virtually no connectivity. With
customers becoming increasingly demanding,
the company was challenged to adjust to
those high standards and implement customer
centricity. Customer service has become a
competitive trump card. Services are difficult to
imitate and can thus be a competitor lock-out.
SCALARE has enabled Husqvarna to make this
transition, with its team of 4-5 software developers expanding to more than 160 people
and enabling a 50% shorter time-to-market
compared to 2016.
Other project results include a prototype of
the open source pattern tool ASPIRE, a webbased
documented case study with searchable
metadata to easily identify solutions for
common scenarios developed by Lero, the Irish
Software Research Centre at the University of
Limerick, and available under an open source
BSD licence. This helps managers identify key
practices when faced with scaling scenarios. The
Inner Source topic – which refers to the adoption
of Open Source practices and processes within
an organisation – has attracted considerable
attention from companies worldwide including
Nokia, PayPal, SAP, and Robert Bosch. The
research studies conducted as part of the
SCALARE project also attracted considerable
interest from companies globally. Researchers at
the University of Limerick have since developed
this work further, which led to a prestigious
4-year research grant from Science Foundation
Ireland. Together with Open Source advocate
Danese Cooper, who started the InnerSource
Commons Community, one of the SCALARE
researchers co-authored a book on Inner Source
published by O’Reilly and freely available. The
InnerSource Community has steadily grown
since, with over 250 members representing a
wide range of companies worldwide. Besides
a considerable body of research studies that
were published during the SCALARE project and
a Special Issue of Softhouse’s magazine, six
Masters students completed their theses on the
SCALARE topics.
Furthermore, the Continuous Delivery (CD)
assessment model was developed by Softhouse
Consulting. It defines different maturity levels
for various disciplines within the software
development lifecycle, necessary to deliver
software fast with good quality. With this
maturity model, Softhouse Consulting already
helped over 30 organisations - from SMEs to
large enterprises - to understand where they
stood in the software development lifecycle,
and from there to define where they wanted
to go. For SMEs, the model gives structure and
for large enterprises it makes the processes
more efficient, as it acts like a guiding layer
in the middle, resulting in as much as 60% efficiency savings for some companies. Thanks
to SCALARE, Softhouse Consulting found a
new way to enter the business area and was
able to recruit 6 additional senior consultants
working with new consultancy services and
achieved an increased revenue of over €400k
per year, thanks to the possibility to reuse
the founding of this model in the areas of IoT
/ Cloud services, AI, ML and Digitalisation.
Finally, by offering the maturity model as a free
download and distributing it widely, it also has
a societal impact; with a low threshold, other
organisations become inspired to take action,
and the model becomes the reference.
Softhouse also developed the Scaling Agile
Model for companies that want to start
agile working on a larger scale. The OSS
Maturity model is primarily a management
communication tool being used at Sony Mobile to enable product value to be extracted from
Open Source Communities and guide the
development of an orchestrated ecosystem.
The SCALARE project accelerated Sony Mobile’s
own maturity in Open Source to the level that
they now are seen as an industry authority both
internally, within the Sony Group, as well as
externally. Sony will continue to benefit from the
software scaling strategies outlined in SCALARE
as they evolve and move to new offerings
“Beyond The Smartphone”, e.g. services based
on Big Data, Cloud and IoT.
The Swedish consulting company Addalot also
extended its consultancy services portfolio as
Open Source and Servitisation consultancy
services were introduced. This led to the
recruitment of 1 senior consultant working with
new consultancy services and an increased
revenue of around €150k per year and growing. Addelot also leads a Swedish industry network
for Open Source, Industrial Open Source
Network (IOSN), under the auspices of the
Swedish lobby organisation for software
intensive companies and academia, Swedsoft.
The members in IOSN include Ericsson, Volvo,
Saab, Scania, Axis, Bosch and Sony Mobile.
With an estimated 10,000 people having
been reached via numerous organised events,
tutorials and keynotes, online videos, the
project partners are helping to ‘arm’ the
European industry for the digital transformation!
More information
https://itea3.org/project/scalare.html
