S60 Smartphone Quality Assurance: A Guide for Mobile Engineers and Developers

Chapter 3: Release Management

A phone program normally involves several software suppliers, as shown in Figure 3-1. Release management can be very demanding in such a multi-supplier environment. Internal teams can also be considered suppliers if such teams do not communicate and interact with each other in a daily basis. Scheduling and mapping the inflow of different sub-system releases and combining them together, can turn out to be one of the biggest risk factors in a program. Therefore release management requires very strict processes and policies as well as everybody's commitment to follow them. A non-analyzed risk in one sub-system maturity can have tremendous impact on the program success. The challenging variables having direct impact on the release management are for example overall complexity of an architecture and software, size of a software system (number of lines in code), estimated number of individual fixes accepted to be integrated after code complete and number of used suppliers.

Let us start by taking the above examples one by one. Software complexity can be divided into two aspects, architectural complexity and code complexity. Architectural complexity has become an issue, especially concerning Object Oriented (OO) software where the importance and value of software reusability, maintainability and adaptability to small chips (as in the mobile phone industry) has been recognized. Unfortunately, the drawback of this is that managing shared resource files can be ...