As a development consultancy, we frequently find ourselves engaging with projects that are already well underway. This has led to a series of observations of some key indicators of whether good development practices are being used or not. These practices offer a form of resiliency - allowing for development to continue in spite of unexpected difficulties such as key staff leaving, late feature additions, rapid team size increases, and many others.
Embedded systems often require one-off development fixtures to help support the development process. Made ad-hoc by hand, these fixtures are often fragile and can take valuable engineering time away from other important tasks. Changes to the PCB manufacturing ecosystem means creating and handling these fixtures doesn't need to be as painful, costly or as time consuming as it has been in the past.
As devices move towards being always online, and software development moves away from a fixed release schedule to a more organic continuous development, it is often useful to move end-user releases for those devices to a similar track. Assuming you have good development infrastructure, and suitable testing, it may be worthwhile looking at combining that with continuous deployment to provide maximum speed to market.
Software testing is one of those amorphous terms that covers a massive range of possibilities. Are we talking about integration, unit, black box, white box, systems, acceptance, regression, load, performance? The list goes on. In our experience, this is almost always a worthwhile effort, with paybacks in testing generally exceeding those from other areas, assuming that a pragmatic approach to testing is taken.
Static code analysis is a system where software is automatically analysed for potential issues without ever being executed - purely from looking at the written source code. Here we’ll quickly touch on what makes static code analysis special and then get stuck into some specific technical examples based on our experience of using it in our work at Spore Lab.
