Innovation is the key to success at 3M. With products as diverse as Scotch® Tape, medical devices, and Web-based applications, 3M research teams are constantly exploring new ideas for consumer and business markets. Supporting this steady flow of product ideas is the 3M Software, Electronic, and Mechanical Systems (SEMS) Laboratory, one of the company’s largest product development labs. To streamline its operations, SEMS deployed Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010. The SEMS team is taking advantage of features such as work item hierarchies, improved testing, and interoperation with products like Microsoft Expression Studio 3 design software. As a result, 3M has been able to simplify its development processes, which is helping the SEMS staff to accelerate the delivery of 3M products into the marketplace.
Situation
3M is one of the world’s most diversified manufacturing companies. It makes products through six operating segments: consumer and office; display and graphics; electronics and communications; healthcare; industrial and transportation; and safety, security, and protection services. Its products and services range from household names such as Post-it® Notes and Scotch® Tape to industrial equipment, orthodontics solutions, and communications technologies. With operations in 60 countries, 3M sells products directly to consumers and also through numerous wholesalers, retailers, distributors, and dealers worldwide. In 2009, the company reported revenues of more than U.S.$25 billion and was ranked 95 on the Fortune 500.
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Visual Studio 2010 gives us more tools and tighter integration in our development environment to accelerate our development efforts and help us move projects along faster.  |
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Mike O’Brien
Software Engineer Specialist, SEMS Laboratory
3M |
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Helping to support this large and highly innovative enterprise is the Software, Electronic, and Mechanical Systems (SEMS) Laboratory, part of the 3M Corporate Research Lab. SEMS focuses on delivering innovative applications that can be used in a range of scenarios. Examples of SEMS applications include software used to operate 3M-designed hardware solutions that help to power Web portals. One SEMS innovation rolled out in 2009 was a Web-based application called the 3M Visual Attention Service. It helps product designers understand how audiences will perceive their creations—for example, a logo design, a Web site layout, or the placement of an electronic screen in a hotel lobby—by analyzing images of a product or design element.
SEMS uses a variety of development tools, including Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, which offers source control, work tracking, defect tracking, requirements management, and other functions to help in collaborative software development projects. However, as demands increased internally to get projects to business owners faster, the SEMS team wanted to use technology that could help improve a number of operations.
“One of the biggest areas we wanted to improve is our overall project management,” says Mike O’Brien, Software Engineer Specialist with SEMS. “We needed to establish a hierarchical view of work items while getting more granular detail on user requirements that could be quickly understood by our teams, instead of having to read through three or four pages of user requests.”
The SEMS team also struggled with testing. “We had gaping holes in our testing tools, and they cost a lot of money,” says Steve Anderson, Quality Assurance Consultant with SEMS. He notes that SEMS had used HP Quality Center and HP QuickTest Professional, but that they are relatively expensive to license and did not always provide the functionality that SEMS needed to quickly and efficiently check code.
Additionally, the SEMS developers wanted better interoperation between their tools and those used by designers. For example, when designing Web sites, business owners would typically create prototypes using Microsoft Office Visio drawing and diagramming software or the Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentation graphics program. Developers would then have to go through a time-consuming process of creating code from scratch to match the prototypes.
Solution
To streamline its development processes, the 3M SEMS lab deployed beta versions of the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate development system and Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010.
Previously, Team Foundation Server only supported a flat list of work items and a basic linking system. But with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010, 3M can now build, maintain, and easily view work items as rich hierarchies that are capable of representing directional relationships between individual work items. Such relationship types include the test cases that confirm when a requirement is properly implemented, or the parent/child relationship between a requirement and the underlying tasks that a development team will need to perform to implement that requirement. SEMS team members can take advantage of this work item hierarchy in the tool of their choice, such as Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheet software, or Microsoft Office Project. This information can be published in project-status reports that are shared on an intranet running on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
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We needed to establish a hierarchical view of work items while getting more granular detail on user requirements that could be quickly understood by our teams, instead of having to read through three or four pages of user requests. |
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Mike O'Brien
Software Engineer Specialist, Software, Electronic, and Mechanical Systems (SEMS) Laboratory
3M |
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The SEMS team is also taking advantage of Microsoft Test Manager 2010 to author and execute manual tests. During test executions, SEMS uses Test Manager 2010 to collect data items such as screenshots, desktop videos, and comments to be associated with each test run. This information can be associated to any bug that is identified during a test failure.
With the new IntelliTrace debugging tool, SEMS staff can step through previously executed code to more efficiently identify bugs. IntelliTrace makes it possible for developers to actually see events that occurred in the past and the context in which they occurred. This reduces the number of restarts that are required to debug an application and the possibility that an error will fail to reproduce when developers rerun the application.
SEMS also takes advantage of tight interoperation with Microsoft Expression Studio 3 design software for Web site prototyping. Business users can develop ideas with SketchFlow in Expression Studio 3, dropping in Web site elements such as graphics, text, links, colors, and layout. These initial ideas can be modified or accepted as is by developers and then easily converted into code in Visual Studio 2010.
Benefits
By deploying Visual Studio 2010, the 3M SEMS team has been able to streamline and accelerate its development processes so it can speed the delivery of high-quality code to its business customers. Project management, aided by the ability to better understand work item hierarchies, has been improved. Code testing is now easier and more effective with the built-in tools provided by Visual Studio 2010. The solution also makes it easier and faster to create prototypes for Web designs requested by internal business departments.
More Efficient Project Management
One of the biggest challenges for any development team is balancing the demands of programming with the requirements that business owners have for their projects. With Visual Studio 2010, the SEMS team can understand the needs of business owners faster and more efficiently than in the past.
“By using Visual Studio 2010, we can drill down to see fine-grained details that help us understand business owner requirements and see where we are at any given time in a project,” says O’Brien. This capability is delivering significant improvements in productivity for the SEMS team, which in the past did not have the time or expertise to develop detailed project management tools.
Kelly Reff, Technical Manager for SEMS, says work item hierarchies are an excellent way of understanding user tasks and requirements. That information, in turn, can be exported to commonly used software applications like Microsoft Office Word or Office Excel. “Our business users may not have access to Team Foundation Server, and we don’t want to purchase another license just for them to view this information. By using Visual Studio 2010, I can quickly export data to Office Excel or Office Word and deliver a report on the project requirements, and it’s easy for a business owner to confirm the data. This is a big leap forward from what we had to work with in the past.”
Easier Testing and Improved Code
Visual Studio 2010 makes it easier for SEMS to improve the quality of its code. “Visual Studio 2010 is simplifying our testing procedures,” says Anderson. “In the past, for example, one of the challenges we had was that Kelly would have data in Excel, and then we would have to run traces based on that information. In Visual Studio 2010, we no longer have to do translations of test data from Excel. Now we can tie test cases directly into the Visual Studio tools.”
O’Brien adds that the SEMS team is evaluating its options for completely replacing the third-party testing tools it has used for years with the built-in tools in Visual Studio 2010. “We will continue to evaluate the testing tools in Visual Studio 2010, and if they satisfy all of our needs, we anticipate that we will get rid of all the other testing tools that we have been using in order to save time and money.”
Faster Prototyping
A significant timesaving feature for SEMS is how Visual Studio 2010 works with tools used for Web site prototyping, especially the Expression Studio 3 suite. It’s a major benefit for the team because of the increasingly large number of requests for Web-based projects from various business teams.
“The tight interoperation of Visual Studio 2010 with the Expression Studio 3 suite is a huge benefit,” says O’Brien. “Our business owners can create rough ideas using SketchFlow, which we can then import into Visual Studio 2010. It’s an excellent tool for prototyping and gives artistic people the freedom to come up with ideas without us having to worry about the time it will take to code an idea from scratch.”
The easy integration of SketchFlow prototypes into Visual Studio 2010 also means that the SEMS team can return working models to business owners much faster than before. “We can give our customers a real feel for their ideas with very little work on our end,” O’Brien says. “We’ve gotten excellent responses from our business units on this. They quickly get working prototypes and useful feedback. Visual Studio 2010 gives us more tools and tighter integration in our development environment to accelerate our development efforts and help us move projects along faster.”
For More Information
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Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 is an integrated development system that helps simplify the entire development process from design to deployment. Unleash your creativity with powerful prototyping, modeling, and design tools that help you bring your vision to life. Work within a personalized environment that helps accelerate the coding process and supports the use of your existing skills, and target a growing number of platforms, including Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and cloud services. Also, work more efficiently thanks to integrated testing and debugging tools that you can use to find and fix bugs quickly and easily to help ensure high-quality solutions.
For more information about Visual Studio 2010, go to:
www.msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published March 2010
