Multi-viewed Visualization of Modularity for Product Line Management : Case study at Hardware Radio Design, Ericsson AB

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how visualization may help Hardware Radio Design at Ericsson AB in their modularity work. As the market requires more and more versions of Radio Units, Ericsson has introduced a modular approach to product family development. With a good modularity, more variants can be developed with the same amount of resources and increase the profit margin. In the work of selecting modular plan, different stakeholders need to understand and evaluate the effect on multiple aspects. Firstly, stakeholders at Ericsson were interviewed to identify what information related to modularity that would benefit from being visualized where development time, resource usage and time-plan have been focused. Secondly, concept designs of visualizations were iteratively developed for the focused areas. The concepts are built on well-known charts, e.g. organizational charts for product structure, bar charts for resource usage and GANTT chart for time plan. Lastly, a web-application was developed with multiple interactive views and models to be able to validate the results with stakeholders. The conclusion of the thesis is that visualization of product family modularity very likely would help stakeholders to understand how modular plans affect different aspects. By supporting multiple views based on the same data, stakeholders with different viewpoints can together discuss and make better decisions. The results also show that it is very likely that a visualization tool for modularity would facilitate the communication amongst the whole organization. As future work, a more extensive verification of the visualizations and tool are necessary to ensure its value in a real development process. Great opportunities exist for expanding the tool with more types of elements, such as software and test cases. Integration with other systems may also provide additional values, such as integration with time reporting system to evaluate time estimates with real outcome.