Behind the Scenes: How Integration Ensures Spatial's Software Remains Reliable and Secure

1. Background & Career
2. The Mission of Integration (RelOps)
3. Delivering Stable Products Internally & Externally
4. Ensuring Software Security and Compliance
5. Cross-Team Collaboration & Operational Excellence
6. About Spatial

Background & Career

• You've been with Dassault Systèmes and Spatial for more than 20 years. Can you walk us through your journey and how you came to lead Integration?

I joined Dassault Systèmes in 1993 as an engineering school intern. After graduation in 1998, I started full-time in the visualization team. By January 2000, I became head of the visualization team at Dassault Systèmes.

I joined Spatial when Dassault Systèmes acquired Spatial in November 2000. I thought I'd stay two or three years, but I never left. In my first years at Spatial, I rotated through different positions annually: visualization, 3D InterOp, then 3D ACIS Modeler, where I stayed until 2006.

About 7-8 years ago, I was offered the Integration leadership role. Having worked across all Spatial R&D teams—visualization, CGM Modeler, 3D InterOp, 3D ACIS Modeler— this comprehensive R&D background proves invaluable in my current position.

• What motivated you to stay within the DASSAULT SYSTÈMES-Spatial ecosystem for so long?

Spatial offered continuous growth opportunities. The ability to change roles every few years kept the work engaging, and each position built on the previous one in meaningful ways.

After building my U.S. career since 2000, I also became personally invested in staying. I married an American in 2005, which naturally anchored me here. The U.S. retirement system is based on your best 35 years of contributions, so by 2035 I'll have built a full career here.

Beyond logistics, the variety of challenges and the continuous evolution of the role kept me engaged and motivated.

• How has the role of Integration evolved since you joined, especially as Spatial's products and customer expectations grew?

The role has evolved significantly. Given my R&D background, Integration has progressively taken on responsibilities that bridge traditional integration and development work.

Our core mission is to receive products from development teams, ensure quality, format them correctly, and deliver to both to Dassault Systèmes and Spatial customers. For Spatial customers, we're the final link—handling packaging and managing the download website. For Dassault Systèmes customers, we're one link in a larger delivery chain, coordinating with teams across multiple sites.

A major evolution came when QA merged with Integration under my leadership. Now we handle both quality assurance and integration operations. This means building code across all supported platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux), running extensive automated tests, managing packaging, and overseeing both the customer website and documentation site.

Having relationships across the DASSAULT SYSTÈMES organization helps immensely when coordinating complex multi-site deliveries.

The Mission of Integration (RelOps)

• For people unfamiliar with RelOps, how would you describe the mission of the Integration team at Spatial?

RelOps (short for Release Operations) is the practice of managing software releases through automated and streamlined processes to ensure reliability, repeatability, and security.We're the bridge between developers and customers. We take what developers create, verify it works across all platforms, run automated tests, package it properly, and deliver it to clients.

We also manage weekly hotfixes—patches that address critical issues. Every week, when developers fix something, we verify it hasn't caused regressions anywhere, package it, and deliver to customers. This weekly cadence is quite exceptional; most organizations do quarterly releases. We maintain multiple active streams with weekly updates on each.

• Your team ensures code compiles across all supported platforms and runs over 1.3 million tests every night. What does it take to maintain such reliability at scale?

It requires serious infrastructure. We currently operate several hundred virtual and physical machines in our data center to support continuous testing across all platforms.

We're also supporting Macs. Since this requires specialized expertise, three years ago we hired a dedicated IT person for Integration, primarily to maintain our Mac infrastructure. Without that dedicated support, we simply couldn't ship Mac releases reliably.

We were early adopters of virtualization at DASSAULT SYSTÈMES about 15 years ago. Today, the vast majority of our machines are virtual, giving us flexibility to scale testing across platforms efficiently.

• What are the key challenges in guaranteeing daily stability while development teams are continuously pushing new changes?

The biggest challenge is ensuring continuity, we operate 52 weeks a year with no downtime. For every critical function, we maintain at least two people—ideally three—who can perform it.

Building this redundancy requires a six-person team with careful organization. We rotate responsibilities so multiple people learn each role. When hiring, we have experienced team members train newcomers. We also maintain extensive documentation —including procedures for power outages that live on Google Drive (in case of power outrage..)

I've personally learned about 80% of my team's work. If necessary, I can execute the entire hotfix process myself, though I rarely need to—maybe once a year.

We also strategically time maintenance for weekend. Two or three team members stay on call Saturday to handle any issues, ensuring no disruption to the weekly Monday hotfix schedule.

Daily, we build code and run tests immediately to catch problems early. This gives development time to fix issues before they affect release schedules. I use a multi-level promotion system—code must pass each level before advancing—so new code never breaks our best stable version.

Delivering Stable Products Internally & Externally

• Why is Integration such a critical checkpoint in the delivery pipeline?

Integration is critical because we coordinate between different release schedules and timelines. We run weekly coordination meetings, especially with the 3D InterOp team, to ensure alignment across all delivery streams. The code takes time to propagate through multiple integration layers, so clear communication and scheduling are essential.

• You also manage weekly hotfixes for customers. How do you balance speed, safety, and product quality?

Through rigorous multi-level processes. We use industry-standard quality tools, including BlackDuck, which scans our code weekly for quality and security issues.

The key is our layered testing approach: developers test locally, teams test collectively, then Integration runs comprehensive validation. Each level adds more tests and controls, catching progressively subtle issues.

If we discover major problems, I have developers on-site who can help fix them immediately. In extreme cases, we can revert the code promotion and return to the previous stable version. Our version control system preserves everything; we maintain complete version history—though rollbacks are rare.

• What happens when a customer request falls outside standard processes, and how does your team build a plan to address it?

I handle these personally. When a non-standard request arrives—typically from support or product management—I conduct an initial assessment, then meet with Spatial R&D VP, Brandon Doerstling and the relevant development team.

We evaluate our options: Can the standardize process work? If not, how can we creatively solve this? My organization has significant flexibility—we can create custom packages with targeted fixes, or even build on specific platform configurations if necessary.

The real questions are cost, time, and R&D impact. We balance individual customer needs against our responsibility to maintain delivery schedules for all customers.

My value-add is problem-solving. I'm not an architect creating new systems—I solve complex delivery challenges. That's my core strength.

Ensuring Software Security and Compliance

• You personally oversee all security-related aspects of Spatial's software. What does this involve on a weekly basis? What tools do you use?

Every week, we use BlackDuck—an industry-leading software for scanning libraries and identifying potential vulnerabilities. We compile findings into a comprehensive knowledge database.

The challenge is that security scanning tools flag many theoretical vulnerabilities. Our job is to determine which ones actually apply to how we use each library. When customers report vulnerabilities, I first match them against our weekly BlackDuck database. Then I investigate where that library is used and consult with development teams.

The critical question is: does the vulnerability affect the specific APIs and functions we actually use, or is it in unused portions of the library? This requires deep technical analysis because scanning tools can't make this distinction automatically.

For the past six months, I've held monthly meetings with support to review all customer-reported vulnerabilities. We track whether they're addressed, in progress, or require coordination with other teams.

When possible, we update libraries promptly. When vulnerabilities don't affect our specific usage, we provide detailed technical explanations to customers. Security is an evolving field, and we continuously adapt our processes to address new threats.

• How do you collaborate with Dassault Systèmes teams on legal notices and compliance, and why is this essential?

This is driven by regulatory requirements, especially in Europe. Laws now require companies to list all third-party components in software products—similar to requirements for physical products.

I work monthly with our legal compliance team. When we have compliance questions, they work with corporate lawyers to determine our rights and obligations.

There's an important legal distinction in software licensing: using third-party code to build an end-user application versus using it to build a component that others will integrate into their applications. Spatial does the latter, which requires careful licensing arrangements.

Regulations mandate that companies produce an SBOM—Software Bill of Materials—listing all third-party components. That's why we generate comprehensive legal notices with each release. We continuously work to align with evolving regulatory standards in this area.

Cross-Team Collaboration & Operational Excellence

• Your team provides continuous feedback to development. How do you maintain strong collaboration across teams?

Physical presence matters. My team, particularly Mark Runyan, maintains strong office presence. Mark is there daily, and people know they can find him for questions. This accessibility is invaluable, especially for new employees.

I also actively circulate—visiting people's offices, chatting in common areas, staying connected to what's happening across teams.

Since taking over Integration, I've run a weekly Wednesday 10am coordination meeting bringing together all R&D teams, support, product marketing, and TAM leadership. Every week we review current issues and align on priorities.

Typically it's a brief 15-minute meeting, but as releases approach, we discuss much more—verifying everyone follows the schedule, tracking necessary approvals, confirming documentation deadlines, addressing escalated customer issues.

I also coordinate the product release planning. I send detailed minutes after each meeting to ensure everyone has documented information they can reference.

• What does it take to run an operational function that must perform flawlessly every day?

We run a daily 8:45am stand-up with the entire team. We review yesterday's work, discuss any problems encountered, and I assign exceptional tasks for the day. Regular tasks are tracked in Jira for longer-term planning, but daily coordination happens in this meeting.

These 15-minute stand-ups focus on surfacing problems, not solving them. If discussions become too technical, we table them for offline resolution. The goal is rapid information sharing and issue identification.

We also communicate constantly via 3DSwym and text messaging. If there's an urgent issue and I'm not in the office, I immediately jump on Zoom or text the team member.

My team starts early—Mark and I arrive at 8am, the rest by 8:45am. Many processes run overnight—automated builds, code transfers between sites, test execution. By 8am, Mark and I are reviewing overnight results and contacting development if issues emerged.

This combination of structured daily coordination and continuous communication enables us to maintain the reliability and consistency our customers depend on.

• Can you share a situation where your team's intervention avoided a major disruption?

On special occasions we collaborated with customers that had blocking issues by providing them a dedicated build on a platform not supported anymore or by enabling specific compilation flags to enable them to overcome their issue.

About Spatial Corp

Spatial Corp, a Dassault Systèmes subsidiary, is the leading provider of 3D software development toolkits for technical applications across a broad range of industries. Spatial 3D modeling, 3D visualization, and CAD translation software development toolkits help application developers deliver market-leading products, maintain focus on core competencies, and reduce time-to-market. For over 35 years, Spatial’s 3D software development toolkits have been adopted by many of the world’s most recognized software developers, manufacturers, research institutes, and universities. Headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado, Spatial has offices in the USA, France, Germany, Japan, China, and the United Kingdom. For more information on Spatial’s latest updates and product offerings, please visit www.spatial.com.