Archive for the ‘Product’ Category

The Embedded System Conference

Friday, May 21st, 2010

The Embedded System Conference (ESC) Silicon Valley in San José is always a fun event, and I enjoy going to the Expo, two or three days each year.

And I was not disappointed in this year’s show, 26 – 29 April 2010!  I met quite a few people there, and we discussed future trends, revisited last year prognosis with today’s achievements. 

Smart phones with their ever emerging new product lines, sporting exciting features and capabilities — and you still can place a simple telephone call!   Wonders never cease… ;)  

Then 3D technology, Internet enabled TVs, fully digitally equipped recording equipment, computerized and completely automated studios, and what not. 

Robot technologies finding their ways in modern appliances and cars.  Smart grid is the next hot thing. 

Hardware with software kits are available for literally just a few dollars to build your own embedded systems.  Micro-chips are becoming smaller and smaller, more powerful and less expensive; the possibilities are endless!

Without going into the details of the all the various Hot Topics and solutions displayed— see eetimes.com, embedded.com, hackaday.com, etc., etc. — I just want to add a few of my favorite highlights:

  • Display of the original German (WW-II era) ENIGMA, a sophisticated coding machine, fully functional, and not under glass.  Thank you, cryptography.com!
  • The “SpeedCuber” — built from a LEGO Mindstorms Robot kit and the program logic and camera of the Motorola Droid, communicating via Blue Tooth — that solved the Rubik’s Cube in just a few minutes.  Demos at the ARM pavilion, arm.com.
  • Badges now sporting RFID; quite a common trend now.
  • EE Times coordinated the treasure hunts: you’d follow in TWITTER @esc_blast, and the tweets (forwarded as SMS to your mobile phone) included instructions what to do and where and how, with the first person to win the prize.

Well, I won a few prices (only a handful folks seem to use TWITTER?); one of my favorites as broadcast by EE Times:

“esc_blast: Jurgen Menge scores LEGO MINDSTORMS Robot Kit @EET Scavenger Hunt.  Thx NI–Robots Rock!  More goodies Thurs @ #esc_events http://ow.ly/i/1ibX“

Next year we will see more solutions in the nano and DNA-like technology, further miniaturizing system and computer components.  The (customized) chip will be in the size of a fingernail and more powerful than a PC eight years ago. 

Blue Tooth and  RFID gaining momentum.  Fiber-Channel and fiber-optics are becoming essential for high-speed data communication.  Wireless USB, USB 3.0, SATA 6 then SATA 12, SAS 6 are available now or are in the process to be finalized, respectively.

Smart phones and touch screen systems will provide applications currently not thought off.  BTW, as to smart phones: Yes, you’d still be able to place and receive telephone calls!

The technological avalanche has only begun…

I plan to visit the next ESC in San José as well: 2 – 5 May 2010.  CU!

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© May 2010 Jürgen Menge, San José

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NAB Show in Las Vegas

Sunday, April 25th, 2010

Similar to the CES in January the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) Show in Las Vegas mid April is quite huge and very well visited.  Though not as packed as I had seen few years ago, popular attractions still had their crowds.

New Technology

Overall, analog audio and video is a thing of the past, everything is now fully digital, high resolution, high quality, high performance and real-time thanks to vast and inexpensive processing power, high-speed network, and storage.

Online and intelligent playlists or scripts accessing the contents though databases support the full automation of radio and TV stations.

And yes, HD and 3D were the highlights at the show:  While the CES (see one of my earlier blogs) demonstrated 3D TV (front-end), the NAB more emphasized on the back-end.

Full HD cameras, even 3D, with set of microphones, recording on stamp-size memory chips, wireless transmission to audio and video processing studio, anchors or actors in green (formerly blue) rooms mixed-in the content or the virtual world, broadcast live and stored on clusters and arrays of hard drives.

Lighting is moving away from the former candescent bulbs with their tremendous (and unwanted) heat to power-efficient and ultra-bright LEDs.  The advantage of the letter: light is on and off immediately, no additional high-speed shutters required, no warm-up and cool-down.

Camera and microphone arms following the object, fully computer controlled in a steady move and focus.

The Web

Internet is becoming more and more the broadcasting medium of the future: All the content available — on demand — with a simple mouse click.  No waiting and arranging your life to fit specific broadcast schedule; no frustration when you then had to find out the show was a rerun or got cancelled because some sports event overran.

And on a private note:  Do cable and satellite companies really think that consumers want a selection of hundreds of channels?  Just to learn that the four or five programmes you were really, really interested in were not offered?  And in the end you start recording the shows because of scheduling conflicts and what not!  And to not waste your time staring at boring if not stupid and often deceiving commercials.  (What is the rocket science that companies have such a hard time providing entertaining and truthful advertisement???)

… else

During the NAB Show quite a few sessions were offered.  You could learn about (possible) trends; what will be the broadcast of the future; the demand that is seen coming and growing.

The consumers will more and more take an interactive role, will become participants.  Online-games already demonstrate that quite lively!  TV stations building fan communities, have their viewers respond with a live broadcast (e.g., “who done it”, or, “what will evolve from there”, etc.).

Innovative ways need to be explored, to attract sponsors, to help pay for the broadcast.  I would see that in the very near future not the number of viewers are the only determining factor anymore (broadcasts for the masses), but content bringing in most revenue (broadcasts for smaller audience paying higher premiums).

To some extend this trend is seen when comparing commercial Radio & TV to public Radio & TV to subscription Radio & TV.

And I hope the educational potential of Radio and TV together with the internet is being embraced much more.  Offer and help the citizens to learn — and without ideology, please!  To become informed.  Which TV station wants their viewers become “couch potatoes”, if not zombies…   ;-)

Note: Broadcasters have a responsibility to their consumers.  And quite a few realize that that is not a contradiction to making money.

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© April 2010 Jürgen Menge, San José

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New Product Introduction

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

New inventions, evolutions of existing products, or perhaps just a different package of a “same ol’” — there are important steps to then developing the product and eventually releasing into the market.

There is not much difference there between a (becoming) Start-Up or an established company: You will make a determination whether the new product makes sense pursuing; or, looking from the other angle, can we allow not to bring out the new product.

The  “Idea” will be analyzed and its potential for success examined; and important questions such as “what does it take” and “what does it cost” need answers.

Business Plan

The feasibility of said idea will be outlined, and the three basic areas addressed:

  • Who is your customer?
  • What appeals them?
  • How will they get the product?

A Business Plan would includes an Overview of the industry of the company and Trends with Market and Competitive analysis; a Mission Statement; then Management, Marketing, Finance, Operating plans.

Once the “go ahead” is achieved, the next step follows.

Market or Product Requirements Document

Product marketing provides the description of the new product, its purpose, the features, the target market and the customers,and the opportunities, comparing against older versions (if any) and competing products, pricing and position, strengths and weaknesses.

The product may be part of a roadmap, embracing trends and new technologies as they will become available.  The MRD or PRD will  specify goals, delivery dates, system and technical requirements, compliance, documentation, quality and testing, support, and perhaps planned life-cycle.

Following the holistic approach, development teams (hardware engineering, software engineering, technical publications, quality, etc.) perhaps key suppliers and partners, and customer sales and service, are included in the very early stages to ensure the document is sound and specifications and goals and contingencies clearly understood and agreed upon in one pass.

Project Plan

Depending on the type and complexity of the product, whether it is a brand-new product or one that just got a bit revised, will determine the amount of preparations involved until start of the project.

A detail plan is then drafted to list the efforts required and the resources needed, the anticipated costs involved and the complete time line.  A variety of tasks and subtasks are then identified with specific owners, priorities, efforts and resources and duration, inter-dependencies to other tasks highlighted, and such.

There can be also situations or events that will need to be included as well:  Availability of certain rooms, machinery or equipment, awaiting Compliance Certifications, etc.   Engineers working on various products may be “over-booked”; so conscious decisions re priority and affected tasks to coordinate  among various products or projects are necessary.

Once the various pieces are compiled together, all or at least most of the resource requirements and prerequisites known, cost estimates are calculated.  Questions to answer are:

  • Can we do it?
  • Everyone on board?
  • Does it still makes sense?

If the answers are satisfactory, and the price tag is below the, well, “walk away” limit, the product development can continue.

Design Document

Each task requires a clear scope, precise specifications, a functional design where applicable, interfaces need to be listed and defined.  Where one task is dependent of others, the hand-off parameters and the expectations have to be exactly spelled out.

The more detail (and thought!) is going into the design, the less problems will arise during development.  A simple misunderstanding or a potential situation not considered early on and caught in initial stages, can have severe consequences if detected only very late and the repair turns out to be rather complex.

Of course, the design is a “living thing”, it may have inaccuracies, or requirements were revised due to economic or technological changes, or a detail may become more time consumptive than planned.  There is consequently continuous feedback from development to design (and product marketing) teams.

Quality & Test and other teams (documentation, training, service) are involved in early stages so that they prepare appropriately and are ready for the new product to come.  An elaborate test plan will be authored to spell out the tasks and procedures that are run to ensure the developed product is in fact the one described in the design.  Manufacturing and sales and support teams (and the customers) will require product manuals and training courses.  Perhaps an older products is being phased out, so migration plans to the next product have to be outlined.

Development Stage

To shorten the overall cycle time, bigger tasks (say, those taking longer than two or three months) are carefully split into smaller, ideally independent tasks.  That way, the various teams (documentation, development, quality & test, operations, etc.) can work in parallel, rather awaiting full completion of the bigger tasks in their individual phases.  Potential problems may arise where smaller, already completed tasks need to be revisited or perhaps even redone, due to discoveries or findings from subsequent tasks…

In each hand-off (from one team to the other), a checklist of the planned / accomplished (sub)tasks, with a updated action items chart.  Program management drives the product development, monitors and communicates status of each task with the teams and stakeholders, ensures deliverables are fulfilled and milestones achieved — in time and on budget.

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(to be continued)

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© March 2010 Jürgen Menge, San José

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go-esdc!

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

Early March I visited the Enterprise Software Development Conference in San Mateo.  This is more an intimate expo with some 25 booths.  Though well visited, you still found time to discuss with the reps their products and offerings in great detail.

I must confess, I have a more academic interest there, still looking for the solution that kept me nagging when working for Mobile Information Systems (Offering real-time solutions for the time-sensitive, same-day transportation industry) — now an entity of Oracle — in year 2000.  Something that I was so used to when I had worked with Unisys in the System Software development in one of my former lives…

Software Releases

As products evolve over time new versions are designed and developed and will become available to the market.  These can be (labeled) completely new software products and customers can choose to pay for the upgrade.  And new revisions or support packages are provided to the user to update their existing software to the most recent level.

Companies release new software products to provide new functionality (aka, features)  to their users, to support new hardware components and devices, to improve usability, to tighten security, and — naturally — make use of the ever increasing resources in processor, memory, disk space, etc.

Using the software you may encounter incidents where the product does not do what it is supposed to do.  That can be a subtlety where, say, the output is not properly aligned.  Or more drastically, where the input is not processed correctly.  And that can range to more serious problems of security leaks or data loss, if not the abort of the application or even the underlying operating system.  Software releases are, therefore, also the vehicle to distribute a list of bug fixes or corrections to said problems.

As nature of things go — after all, computers are only human, too! ;) —, a new release may not only be the latest and greatest thing, it can also introduce new problems.  Perhaps some hardware component or software function not supported anymore.  Or new bugs frustrating the user.

There are a variety of reasons a user does not want to move to a new main release and expects that recent releases still to be supported.  Consequently, companies maintain several main and support releases, replicating development and addressing incidents and providing patches to the given “dot” release.  Eventually, older releases are phased out and their support will cease.

Release Streams

Main releases, as mentioned before, introduce new functionality and are intended to advance the company in a competitive market, increase share and revenue stream.  Likewise, said company needs to ensure their products are “bug free”; even if it means to continuously provide resources and fix incidents over the life of the product.

A company will, therefore, enjoy a variety of software releases.  A few main releases with various support or patch releases.  A software product usually consists of a variety of individual pieces, programs, drivers, user interfaces, messages, reports, libraries, third party components, and what not.  All these parts comprise — are controlled through — the release stream.  And perhaps there are also special software packages with different set of features, supporting specific hardware components, etc.

And while plans are executed to phase out older releases, there are already the future releases and schedules on the drawing board: specifications are laid-out and defined for the new product to be.  Functional and detail design are written, and eventual resources are planned and assigned for the development, documentation, test, etc.

Good strategy is to introduce new (major) functionality only in main releases = new products, whereas support or patch releases (branched off from the underlying main release) are more the vehicle to further stabilize the release with well-defined sets of software or product fixes.  (L10N and I18N also comes to mind.)

Software Development Suites record each individual modification to the software components, Software Life-Cycle and Change Management tools help to keep overall track.  The Task database on the other hand is the repository containing incidents reported and feature requests against given releases, severity and priority, detail description or specification, current task status and updates, department and engineer assigned, etc.

While certain problems can be more readily detected during the normal use of the product (the goal of the quality assurance team, naturally, should be to find said problems before the user installs the product!), others, however, may not be obvious to the end-user.  Either, the problem does not occur in the specific environment of the user; or, it may be some security exploit, the user would not even notice.  Whatever the nature, chances are that the incident could occur not just in one but in other releases as well.

Consequently, each software release stream is then reviewed and determination made, whether a fix will need to be replicated — or perhaps newly developed —, based on the problem at hand and the prerequisites and requirements of the given release stream.

Software Quality

While the software developer working on a new feature or creating a fix for a reported incident is doing the due-diligent to ensure the software change is doing what it is supposed to do (and there may also additional code reviews), based on the design or the description of the incident, it is later the software quality team’s task to put the final stamp of “passed!”.

Of course, the patches are not tested as soon they become available, rather, the defined collection of such software features and fixes are included in a formal release cut-off process and then handed over to the software quality team.  The interval of such cut-off can be weekly, monthly, daily; whatever makes most sense in the current situation.

The software quality takes the handed-off release stream and deploys the product on their prepared environment, what can be a fresh install or an update.  Part of the hand-off are release notes, updates of the task database linking the features and fixes to one or more changes in software and/or documentation.

A set of test runs are started (automated or manual) confirming the working of the feature or fix (Conformance testing) while assuring that no new incidents were introduced (Regression testing).  The tests and the results are carefully documented following the key principles: a test shall be repeatable, the results reproducible, and the test environment reliable.

There may be situation that a patch or a series of patches need to be pulled (and updating the task database, hopefully, setting task status appropriately), perhaps due to product stability concerns.  Software engineering is then addressing concerns based on the documentation provided.  Once software quality puts there “QA stamp” on the given release, that release is then ready to proceed to the next phase; e.g., handing over to professional services to customer deployment, publishing on web site for download, etc.

Release Readiness

Closing in on the scheduled release date, the software team re-evaluates the planned and prioritized features and fixes against those that are available and have passed testing.  Questions to answer are: Is the release process on target?  If not, what is missing and what would it take?  Are the missing pieces requirement for the target release?  What are the consequences if the schedule were to slip?  Would it make sense to get the product out as it and publish a revision soon after?

There can be different approaches to tackle these problems (and I may elaborate further in a separate blog).

Whatever the outcome, eventually the product is signed off and ready to go.  Let’s celebrate!   :)

And the next releases are already in the making…

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(to be continued)

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©  March 2010 Jürgen Menge, San José

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