SATURN 2020

With the growing complexity of Computed Tomography Systems, big-bang integrations become an incalculable business risk, and with more than 100 developers world-wide DevOps caters to the need for risk reduction, shorter time-to-recovery, and faster time-to-market.

This talk presents a summary of our journey towards applying DevOps methods within medical device development. We defined our DevOps goal to mean deploying an in-house installation equivalent to a customer site. Our starting point was to enable continuous deployment and fully automate the chain from code-change to full system installation.

The software structure/architecture and the development processes and tools are subsequent improvement areas. We were missing efficient support for small change sets and the evolution into a monolith prevent us using small binary-artifact based components for integration. We describe the reasons and impact, and present first results from improvements.

Further we lay out the challenges regarding the necessary cultural change, which has additional aspects within system development compared to software-only development. We explain not only the success, but also the setbacks that we encountered.

The talks closes with an outlook on concrete next steps but will also shed some light on visionary aspects like "continuous compliance" to help enable direct deployment to customer sites.