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Invensys Rail Discovers Agile Development Process with SCADE Suite

Invensys Rail is a division of Invensys plc and is a multinational leader in rail control and communication solutions. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, Invensys Rail employs over 4,100 people in 30 worldwide locations. The company has over 100 customers and annual sales of 700 million pounds. Invensys Rail is heavily involved in all areas of rail systems, including interlockings, control centers, CBTC, ERTMS, trackside, crossing and communications. Basically, Invensys is creating the integrated railway of tomorrow, today.

In March 2010, Invensys Rail selected SCADE Suite for a Train Data Management Systems (TDMS) project. Invensys Rail chose SCADE Suite because it is best in class, providing an efficient development environment and an EN 50128 certified code generator. The TDMS must facilitate adaption of Invensys Mass Transit Systems to disparate deployments. In order to accomplish this, the TDMS must support changing customer requirements and varying configurations as well as be flexible and easy to maintain. Most importantly, it must be certifiable under EN 50128.

SCADE was used for application development, integration and testing as well as verification activities. While Invensys Rail used SCADE, they realized that their development process was evolving from a feature driven approach to an agile feature driven approach. Process-level benefits drove this evolution because SCADE facilitated dialog between systems and software engineers and feature changes could be implemented so quickly in SCADE.

At project completion, Invensys Rail realized that SCADE functionality for features was consistently completed ahead on non-SCADE tasks. In fact, Invensys Rail is replacing C++ Architectural Services with SCADE. SCADE is now being used on system partitions within the application software layer in addition to application partitions. When the project began, 60% was in SCADE; now 90% is in SCADE!