SmartDelta project: Automated quality assurance and optimization across product versions and variants

Software systems are often built in increments with additional features or enhancements on top of existing products. This incremental development may result in the deterioration of certain quality aspects. In other words, the software can be considered an evolving entity emanating different quality characteristics as it gets updated over time with new features or deployed in different operational environments. Approaching software development with this mindset and awareness regarding quality evolution over time can be a key factor for the long-term success of a company in today’s highly competitive market of industrial software-intensive products. Therefore, it is important to be able to accurately analyze and determine the quality implications of each change and increment to a software system. To address this challenge, the multinational SmartDelta project develops automated solutions for the quality assessment of product deltas in a continuous engineering environment. The project provides smart analytics from development artifacts and system executions, offering insights into quality degradation or improvements across different product versions, and providing recommendations for the next builds. This paper presents the challenges in incremental software development tackled in the scope of the SmartDelta project, and the solutions that are produced and planned in the project, along with the industrial impact of the project for software-intensive industrial systems.