Governing the process chain of product development with an enhanced Quality Gate approach

Good design is just getting valuable to a company when it is transformed into successful products in an effective way. Therefore, the central challenge is to govern the overall transformation process. A well known approach for assuring the whole development process is the Quality Gate approach. The approach to be presented in this paper deals with modelling the process and related information flows by means of extended UML activity diagrams in combination with analysing the process by using different process management tools. This approach enables an improved planning of the whole process and optimised placing of Quality Gates in the process chain. As a result, a structured proceeding of identifying neuralgic project activities or information flows as well as the conduction of an optimised process assurance by Quality Gates is given.