TIOBE QA award Q3 2021

Eleva System Control SW is responsible for providing physical components/devices abstraction to Eleva. This ensures adoptability to new components and technologies to Philips radiography and fluoroscopy systems.

Quality is always a major driver due to the regulated environment and IEC62304

• There is a long history of quality assurance tools like static code analysis, code review etc.
• Dedicated resources and management support for software quality assurance.
• Introduction of LEAN methodology to software development e.g. visual management and continuous improvement.
• Experienced team with quality mindset knowing the benefits of automated code quality measurements.
• Learning culture that distributes new techniques within the team e.g. unit test techniques.

It was certainly not an easy route to achieve this. According to the team architect and software designer of the team this was mainly because the existing code base was already large. It is hard to apply software quality measurements to such a system and find a way to improve gradually while making sure that you are really improving the code instead of focusing on tool satisfaction.

According to the software team, TIOBE’s TiCS framework helped to reach these goals in the following ways:

• Central toolset that helps on visual software code quality assurance.
• Alignment of different tools from different vendors to a central entry point for engineers.
• Allows managers to easily observe improvements in code quality by having an easy quality indicator system.
• Setting the standards for software quality metrics, the TQI helps discovering the improvement points within our code base.
• Opening the field for competition with other software development teams.
• TICS viewer filters can be used to provide the visualization of our current SMART KPIs (LEAN).

Of course there is also room for improvement for the TiCS tooling such as better performance, more customizations for code complexity and improved C/C++ code checkers.