LEM TECH France External ASPICE Lead Assessor & SYS/SWQA Consultant

Considering I had no official management  responsibilties/ non-exhaustive list:

QUALITY ASSURANCE / PROCESS IMPROVEMENT

• First time 2 ASPICE Assessments (performed with a highly skilled co-assessor, the FuSa & SWQA Manager, certified ASPICE Provisional Assessor and Functional Safety Professional as well, and whose recommendation is added in the dedicated section  and in the picture below), lead to:

  • a tangible awareness from Senior Management and CTO of the critical situation of the Documentation / Configuration / Version Management practices (low level DevOps SW & high level documentation management findings) in terms of cost, time efficiency and maturity (potentially 2Meuros/year to save once fixed on all LEM sites and an increased level of CM process maturity clearly required to comply with ASPICE, IATF 16949 and ISO 26262).

  • a Major internal company-wise initiative sponsored/approved by the CTO based on my Assessment results and the road map with its 6-7 Work Packages I defined and that resulted in the hiring of a Senior Consultant to implement this initiative in LEM Product Development Process.

  • To be noted, the VP Quality (feedback below) said during the conclusion meeting of the first assessment “with Antoine, we don’t need any BIG external agency to perform our assessments”.

• First time the findings raised during the internal ASPICE Assessment and the SW PPAP action plan are properly tracked in CodeBeamer ALM.

• First time Confluence and Sharepoint tools are used in the FuSa/SWQA/Cybersecurity team with state of the art practices to exhaustively (no use of basic hard drive / server without real Version Mgt tool installed on it, like Tortoise SVN) and properly store/archive/retrieve, automatically handle versions, allow collaborative and simultaneous modifications and create baselines of formal work products (whether these are process or project/product-related Configuration Items) + use of advanced dynamic and asynchronous Sharepoint features to send automatic and real time notifications when specific work products under configuration have just been modified (=> ensure better CM integrity / visibility on few sensitive work products). It motivated other team members to manage their documents in Sharepoint as well.

• First time an independent Authority (V&V, QA, FuSa, CS, PQE, external IATF/ISO certification body…) detects that the automatic Polyspace (Bugfinder/Codeprover) source code analyses have been deactivated from the CI/CB/CD process for a while, potentially hiding major defects and causing bottleneck effects at the EOF the project.

• Huge rework of the QAP template structure and content (Quality Assurance Plan) to document a brand new QAP in Confluence web based tool and use its features to organize the first very effective and collaborative formal and informal reviews of the QAP in LEM Tech France on an ASIL B Residual Current Detection Sensor: 71 informal review findings raised by Project Quality Engineer, FuSa Manager, SW Lead, System Engineer and Project Manager in Confluence tool using its “resolved/unresolved comments” feature + 30 formal review findings raised by an independent SWQA Engineer using the first template of Formal Work Product Review Form including automatic KPIs that I created during the first week of my contract in LEM Tech France (Pivot tables).

• First time a formal Work Product/Project Plan (QAP) integrated an easy-to-understand, graphical and brief textual overview of the RCD product in English language (without the use of AI) based on documents and an informal technical presentation provided by an Innovation Expert, this brand new sensor supposed to be a SeooC (Safety Element Out Of Context) and innovative COTS (Component On The Shelves) based on the fluxgate technology (electromagnetism concept) which was one of the key products for the future international sales strategy of the company still had NO CONCRETE HIGH LEVEL DESCRIPTION of the PRODUCT in ENGLISH LANGUAGE in a half-page to properly document and communicate project work products internally, and most important, to all external Stakeholders, including current potential clients. I then witnessed several other project plans/items that reused my product overview / high-level description in English (e.g. Functional Safety Concept from Project FuSa Manager). 🙂

• First time Codebeamer ALM has been used to estimate, schedule, track and close the FuSa and QA tasks (transversal, process & project/product). I initiated these practices spontaneously, then the Line Manager decided to move the fuSa & SWQA Team Tasks plan and tracking from a basic excel sheet to Codebeamer trackers and metrics.

New QA Strategy establihed in Confluence tool in order to get it much more interactive => it led to a very effective and collaborative formal and informal review of this QAP:

• 71 informal review findings raised by the Project Quality, Functional Safety, System Engineer, SW Product Leader and Project Manager (using "(un)Resolved Comments" feature of Confluence tool)

• 30 formal review finding raised by the independent System/SW Quality Engineer who used the first template of Formal Work Product Review Form (see below) including automatic KPIs that I created during the first week of my contract in LEM Tech France (Pivot tables).

Easy-to-understand, graphical and brief textual overview of the RCD product in English language (without the use of AI) based on documents and an informal technical presentation provided by an Innovation Expert, this brand new sensor supposed to be an ISO26262 SeooC (Safety Element Out Of Context) and innovative COTS (Component On The Shelves) based on the fluxgate technology (electromagnetism concept) which was one of the key products for the future international sales strategy of the company still had NO CONCRETE HIGH LEVEL DESCRIPTION of the PRODUCT in ENGLISH LANGUAGE in a half-page to properly document and communicate project work products internally, and most important, to all external Stakeholders, including current potential clients. I then witnessed several other project plans/items that reused my product overview / high-level description in English (e.g. Functional Safety Concept from Project FuSa Manager). 🙂

I was rewarded throughout my 2 years as a freelance engineer at LEM TECH France right from the end of the first month when my workload increased from 60% to 100% (there were 2 freelancers hired at the same time, but the other one was not retained) and being responsible, in addition to quality assurance on the RCD project, for Functional Safety on the BDM project (in particular, "Confidence in the Use of SW Tools" and "Dependent Failure Analysis", 2 subjects required by ISO26262 and not yet addressed by LEM). My freelance contracts were extended 3 times through a recruitment agency with an increase in the hourly rate at each contract renewal, and then LEM hired me for 1 year as a tier #1 supplier and increased my hourly rate by 40%. Once again, the greatest reward remains the human adventure I had in this team as you can see from the 2 reviews that Raphaël and Mssimo have provided. With Valeo and Ausy, LEM TECH France remains one of my best professional memories.

VALEO CMMI L2 PROJECT

In charge of SW Quality Assurance activities throughout SW Development Lifecycle, mainly performed through monthly project audits supported by an Audit Workbook defined by the SWQA workgroup from CMMI project:

Auditing of 3 series projects (Volvo X60, Renault Laguna, Citroën C6) covering all CMMI processes from Project Planning, Monitoring and Control, Process and Product QA, Supplier Agreement Management (Acquisition of CAN MCAL driver + LIN conformance tests performed externally before I integrated the LIN Emulator in our Automatic Test Bench allowing internal and automatic LIN characterization and testing, see below chapter), to Configuration & Change Management, Requirement Management, and Measurement (KPIs collection and analysis). The Audit Workbook was documented on a monthly basis during a 2 hours interview with the SW Project Lead, then the Audit results were reported to the SW Director (also acting as CMMI Project Manager) and the Engineering Quality Director both based in Paris area, and the Electronics Department Manager, the Project Quality Engineer and the entire SW Team all based in Angers. Results consisted in different charts, graphs and KPIs showing the level of compliance of each process with CMMI and our internal Standard SW process defined by the SEPG (SW Engineering Process Group) and its Process Owners and workgroups. These Audit results were printed and displayed on a monthly basis on the System and SW Board located in the R&D open space

Member of the CMMI L2 project: CMMI Introduction training, evaluation and reporting of the process deployment.

For both sites, Paris (P2: Prototypes, mock-up, standard SW components...) and Angers (P1: mass production customer projects reusing some standard components from Paris, external CAN driver and adding the entire Application Layer developed in MBD and automatic Code generation), gathering of all SW work products compliant with CMMI L2 on 3 mass production projects from Angers and 2 standards SW components development projects from Paris to fill in the CMMI Appraisal Database managed in "Appraisal Assistant" tool (free open source SW tool developed by an US based University), CMMI Appraisal Team Member (CMMI ATM) part of the 2 ATMs "mini-team" responsible for auditing PM and SAM processes against CMMI L2. Also successfully audited on PPQA process which I was responsible for on Angers site.

First Automotive Tier-1 achieving CMMI Level 2 compliance in France in 2007, key success for both VALEO reputation in engineering quality/efficiency and to achieve business objectives (ability to be awarded in key RFQs with OEMs requiring CMMI and then ASPICE and ISO 26262 compliance).

I have been rewarded in different ways throughout my experience at VALEO for nearly 3 years: first, by seeing my first 8-week contract extended after the delivery of my first embedded software in mass production, then by being hired by VALEO after 8 months among 5 contractors to replace the Validation and Quality Manager who was leaving the company to return to his home region (see his recommendation below, he was my technical manager during my first months at VALEO). I was then the engineer who received the best salary increase in the electronics department for the next 2 years, I secured 2 cross-departmental budgets dedicated solely to me outside of client budgets, I obtained a full-time VALEO Offshore resource (Egypt) in addition to the apprentice engineer who worked under my technical supervision 80% of the time, and I occasionally had 1 or 2 contractors on site who worked on my activities when there was an overload, and I received 3 additional days off following the CMMI L2 evaluation.

But the best reward I had in this experience at Valeo is having met several brilliant personalities, including one engineer in particular, a young graduate who ranked 2nd in his class at the 2nd engineering school in France, Centrale SupElec, just behind the inevitable Ecole Polytechnique. This young man and I performed 'Two men shows' in the company restaurant and at Team Building events, which remain memorable moments for me.

After my departure, I thanked my colleagues and friends Sébastien (from Centrale SupElec), Erwan, Gino, Samuel, Emmanuel, Baptiste, and a few others in a message for the fantastic human experience I had with them over the past 3 years.