Oliver Meili

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Release Ownership

As a Program Manager I started with the ownership of a small feature within the in-vehicle infotainment system. From release to release the parts increased from the small feature, to part of the most important feature, to several features and finally to the whole produt. The work included defining the scope for each release with the customer, get sign-off of the scope and deliver for each of the defined milestones. The usual challenges included balancing the capacity of the development and test teams with the customer requirements in order to deliver high quality. In all releases the team finished on time and the drop of new bugs found also proved that we achieved the desired quality level. I achieved my goal of successfully working with the customer in the US and the engineering team in the US and China through a lot of listening, addressing concerns and agreement on fundamental facts.

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Cloud Services

The Internet of Things is about more than just connecting devices to the Internet. Every product needs to create some unique value. As the Internet of Things group transitioned from in-vehicle infotainment systems to the connected car, cloud services became the focus. To prove the value and capabilities of our team we built a cloud service to demonstrate how data gathered from connected devices can be mashed up with other information to create some additional value. I defined a cloud service which gathered subjective user feedback from customer surveys and various Internet forums and correlated that information with objective engineering data such as logs from the in-vehicle devices and data from the bug tracking system. I used that data to estimate the primary quality metric in the auto indutry, the Things Gone Wrong from the J.D. Powers quality reports, and provide a means to take corrective actions. Log and bug data helped to estimate the improvement, while the geocoded customer feedback gave valuable insights into customer feedback trends in various locations.

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Employee Satisfaction

Happy employees perform better. This fact is well known in many companies and Microsoft is no exception. An annual survey determines a Work Health Index by which the satisfaction of the team is measured. In order to improve this index I volunteered to lead the activities for the Program Management department. Through interviews I determined the pain points and worked with management to create awareness to existing issues and to devise an action plan. The actions taken resulted in an increase of 5 percentage points year over year.

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Excellent Project Management Skills

Managed software development projects for an automotive engineering services company from answering a request for quotation to successful completion. The developed software entered series production of vehicles and fulfilled the quality standards required by the car manufacturers. The scope contained the complete software for a small electronic control unit, which we built from scratch. The final result included two modules from a supplier, whom I managed during the project. I discussed the quality requirements with the car manufacturers and performed a tailoring to the projects' needs. The projects consisted of different variants of the software to be delivered to different car manufacturers. Together with the the manufacturer of the electro-mechanical module and the electronics hardware manufacturer I developed the requirements on the software. The software had to be fully tested and we automated testing where resonable. During a few dozen software deliveries only two deadlines slipped by a few days and only a very low number on issues were reported, while we completed the projects on-budget.

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Increased Efficiency

One of the major challenges in the projects consisted of managing many different variants of the software for the different car manufacturers. I designed the software from the start to accomodate for those differences by making the software configurable. In order to minimize the effort in maintaining the system requirements and test specifications, I devised a system consisting of a common base of requirements and the possibility to select requirements and test-cases as needed for each variant. The specifications were parametrized in order to further simplify their maintenance. Using the development kits of the tools I developed add-ons to support the chosen methodolgy to easily generate baselines of all the specifications as well as templates for test reports from the test specification. Furthermore add-ons for the different tools made repetitive and error-prone work unnecessary.

One of the biggest challenges at Microsoft was testing the in-vehicle infotainment systems user interface which was built in Flash. Adapating some concepts from earlier experience I worked with two senior development engineers in test who developed a first prototype. The prototype was presented to the wider team and finally the tool was adopted and used for roughly 50% of all automated tests. Additionally I worked on meaningful charts to track project progress by using the readily available automated infrastructure to have daily updated progress charts on a single click.

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Setup Development Process

A very high-level software development process was present at the company at the start of the project, however not adapted for embedded software. During the six months from initiation of the project until the first software delivery, I set-up and established a complete development process based on the generic process. I wrote guidelines for tool usage and introduced a new tool for object-oriented software architecture and design. A test strategy had to be devised and test equipment for an embedded system had to be purchased. The test equipment finally simulated the final customer hardware as much as possible by providing stimulation and measurement points where needed to thoroughly test the software. To monitor and control the project I introduced additional methods based on the existing project controlling tool in order to enhance the possibility of project controlling.

Jointly with the team I further improved the development process during the projects to achieve better results in less time.

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Built a Team

At the start of the project a team of four people (including myself) was put together, which had not previously worked in this constellation. When needed during the project I added additional resources for a limited time when the schedule was tight and it was reasonable to do so. The team members were all junior members who had not worked on a series software project for car electronics before. I coached the individuals to work in a team and support one another in order to achieve a common goal. To obtain the necessary maturity for the project execution I coached each member individually. I solved conflicts sustainably when they appeared. With every team member I defined a specialization domain. The knowledge in that domain was enhanced by training and focussed working groups with people from other branch offices.

Social events were also part in strengthening the teams identity.

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Fostered Knowledge Exchange

As responsible person for the AUTOSAR working group within the company I organized several workshops to exchange information among the interested and concerned people in the different branch offices. I used these workshops also to learn more about the other branch offices and local practices. This knowledge proved to be vital to pointing people with questions or problems to the right people who had solved a similar problem before. Through the contacts I gained support to set-up a working group for process definition and improvement, which further fostered the contacts among the people. By encouraging the team members to participate in process definition, they not only felt more obliged to adhere to the process, but also had to deal with people from other departments and locations. The open atmosphere then helped solve problems more efficiently.

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Enabled Customers

In the role as a project manager and field application engineer, I was coaching and supporting the customer about the complex topic of AUTOSAR. The standard introduced many new concepts and a standard way to implement the non-competitive basic software or infrastructure software of a modern electronic control unit of a car or truck. Furthermore the standard defines a new methodology for the top-down definition of an automobile's software architecture. Once the standard had reached a certain maturity and it became obvious the standard would be successful, more and more suppliers and car manufacturers started implementing prototypes based on the company's software.

Due to the novelty of the standard the knowledge of the contained functionality and the methodology on how to apply the standard were not yet present in these companies. I thus supported the companies with technical consulting, which required a thorough understanding of the standard in order to decide how to best implement a certain functionality. The required knowledge I gained by self-study of the standard's documents in an efficient manner and by consulting the domain specialists within the company.

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Led Software Development

In the function of the technical product manager I planned and executed a development project for embedded software for in-car communications. One of the duties as to lead the development team of a dozen developers, by coordinating their activities and giving them input on common standards. Furthermore I filled the task of software integrator and tester for the finished modules, giving the colleagues feedback about necessary changes.

As an intermediate step I built a demonstrator project consisting of three elecontric controls units. I presented the finished demonstrator at the company's boot at the Embedded World fair in Nuremberg, Germany, one of the most important international fairs for embedded software. The company's goal was to prove the know-how in the new technology based on the AUTOSAR standard.

Through my outstanding work I earned the informal title of "Mr. AUTOSAR" at the company and established a reputation for excellent technical knowledge through all layers of management.

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Achieved On-Time and On-Scope Delivery

The customers building prototypes of automotive electronic control units according to the AUTOSAR standard where buying evaluation products from the company. Due to the vastness of the standard which consisted of a few thausend pages of specification, not all features could be implemented in the beginning. It was my task to determine the feasible scope among three product development departments and the customer. Additionally I integrated and tested the final modules before we delivered the software to the customer. The responsibility included the planning, monitoring and control, as well as execution of the customer projects. The features and delivery date in each delivered release had to correspond to the customers project plan.

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Performed Release Planning

The final product, which we developed at the company, consisted of three large building blocks, which had many dependencies. Since the departments had a disjoint focus and background, they spoke different languages when talking about products and releases. As a project coordinator I organized meetings and established a common release planning in order to meet the early customers' needs with the product.

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Researched in Information and Coding Theory

The focus of the research were multi-user communication channels, such as the binary adder channel, and the efficient decoding of convolutional codes. Besides theoretical research I performed simulations to derive Monte-Carlo results for the algorithms found.

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Created Student Exercises and Lab Sessions

In my duty as a teaching assistant I conceived student exercised from scratch. The problems had to be solvable by students in the third semester in system engineering. The domains were mainly digital circuit design and cryptography. I provided the students the questions and also the sample solutions.

To enhance the understanding of the theory I set up a lab session for the circuit design class where the students could prepare a circuit and implement it on a bread board using standard components. The exercises consisted of simple circuits which could be realized with two to three integrated circuits and a few discrete components.

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Taught and Supervised Students

The exercises and lab sessions I prepared were also executed with the students. This consisted of one hour per week of discussion of completed and graded problem sets and presentation of the upcoming problem set with short explanations of what was expected.

During the one semester absence of the professor I completely taught the circuit design class to the students and led the homework sessions. The experience gained were a perfect start for professional presentations and customer training in my further career.

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