Today’s device manufacturers face conflicting demands: Get the product out the door. Minimize development cost. Meet ever-changing customer requirements. Certify your device. The list goes on. Add the fact that most development organizations are constantly in flux with staff (in-house or contracted developers), development tools and processes, number and complexity of projects, requirements, and standards they must meet, and you can almost taste the stress.
If your company is typical, you can see the usual “fight or flight” reaction at all levels of your organization. A poignant Dilbert cartoon pictured one manager pointing his finger at his team and dictating that his engineers “just code while he goes out and figures out the requirements.” Unfortunately, this rush to market is a common driver for poor code quality.
Some managers give lip service to quality code, but when push comes to shove, they’re willing to sacrifice quality for time to market. The pressure on developers can cause problems from the other direction, where they feel they have to shortcut their development or testing process to meet a schedule. To heck with coding standards, requirements traceability, or testing -- finish coding.
Either way, the result is disastrous.
Today, the pressure is on for software organizations in safety- and security-critical markets to ensure their software does not fail. No security vulnerabilities. No hazards due to poor coding practices or insufficiently tested code. And, depending on your sector, you may now also need to certify and/or qualify your code under safety standards such as DO-178 (aerospace), IEC 61508 (industrial), EN 50128 (rail), IEC 62304 (medical), or ISO 26262 (automotive).
How can you manage all of this on top of meeting requirements, budget, and schedule? Effective requirements management and verification is key. Gone are the days when you could manage requirements and verification manually.
We're all tired of hearing how system complexity is skyrocketing. It's not news. Most engineers in these critical markets want help taking care of the mundane but important “stuff” so they can do a better job of architecting and implementing the right solution. Give them affordable and easy-to-use tools that help keep track of -- and trace -- requirements to design, code, verification plans, procedures, and results. Automate the process of checking code against coding standards, generating test cases and harnesses, executing regression tests, recording results, and generating documentation.
Let the engineers focus on what they do best, engineering safety- and security-critical solutions, so we can depend on those medical devices, our industrial control systems, military systems, smart grids, automobile adaptive cruise control systems, and the avionics and flight controls in planes that take us on vacation.
Just a thought. What do you think? Tell us in the comments section below.
Jim McElroy, vice president of marketing at LDRA Technology, is focused on expanding LDRA business in the embedded software verification market by improving developer productivity and software quality in critical application development.
With embedded systems an important part of all types of products, even mainstream consumer household goods, the software piece of development plays an increasingly important role so you are absolutely right that the entire development team needs to care--not just the software guys.
Unfortunately, automated requirements traceability and vertification of code, if practiced at all, is typically performed in a separate system that has little to no integration with the other primary engineering systems like PDM, CAD, and ECAD. Sensing the need and spying opportunity, most of the leading PLM vendors have made it a priority to change that scenario, either acquiring or building out requirements and traceability functionality as part of their integrated PLM suites.
Beth, you are correct. Tools that pull in all requirements and information across the system can be a real differentiator. I "grew up" in the aerospace industry (primarily space). We put a lot of effort into requirements, traceability and testing, of course. In the early days much of what we had was home grown. The projects were big enough that this was not an issue. After getting out into the commercial world, I was appaled at the lack of requirements traceability and the risky situations companies put themselves in when developing products.
With the new standards mentioned by Jim in the article, it is no longer sufficient to handle requirements manually in many areas. I recall a discussion on Embedded.com on certification of engineers in the areas mentioned being required at some point. That is how critical software and requirements traceability is.
That scenario you describe, Naperlou, is definitely spot on with what I've continually heard from engineers and industry folk. Siloed, oftentimes, proprietary and custom-built systems that have little integration with the rest of the engineering tool suite. I think while the aerospace companies might still use their proprietary systems (afterall, they've made a huge investment), many other companies, including automotive makers, are branching out into the requirements traceability function as part of a broader PLM effort.
Yes, I agree that defining effective requirements is key to a successful project launch. With products and systems becoming more and more complex, it seems that the majority of my time is used to properly gather, define, adjust and trace project requirements. I expect this trend to continue to grow as system complexity continues to increase.
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