CLAAS Metadiag© — Tractor Diagnostic Solution
An after-sales diagnostic solution used to manage workshop diagnosis for every failure on a CLAAS machine.
Organisation
Role
Team Lead (~12 engineers)
Period
2000 — 2010
Tech stack
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Metadiag© is the after-sales diagnostic solution I led the design and development of at CLAAS Tractor over a decade. It grew from a focused diagnostic tool into a complete framework — spanning 100 projects and roughly 2000 classes — used to diagnose every failure on a CLAAS machine across dealer workshops.
As team lead of around twelve engineers, I owned the technical direction end to end: communication drivers down to the protocol level (RS232, ISO9141, ISO15765, KWP2000), a 2D/3D graphical layer combining WinForms, WPF and OpenGL/DirectX, code-generation wizards to keep the growing codebase maintainable, and the packaging and update-distribution pipeline that shipped the tool to workshops.
This is the project that shaped how I think about software architecture: building something that started small and had to scale gracefully to thousands of classes and a decade of evolving hardware without collapsing under its own weight.
Key contributions
- Estimated and chose the development tools for the project.
- Analyzed and designed RS232, ISO9141, ISO15765 and KWP2000 communication drivers.
- Collaborated with hardware interface and controller suppliers.
- Developed an extensible framework spanning 100 projects and 2000 classes.
- Built the GUI on WinForms and WPF, with contextual menus and 3D components (OpenGL and DirectX).
- Designed wizards and automatic code generation to automate redundant tasks.
- Assisted and advised the developer team, ran code reviews.
- Handled packaging (Install Shield, InnoSetup) and update distribution via a website.
- Defined and implemented test procedures, wrote functional/technical specifications and user documentation.