TEAM Zarate Tarrani Notes From the Field

Now For Something Strange. As long as I'm dredging up old books that I think are still useful, here is one that is worth tracking down: Testing to Verify Design and Manufacturing Readiness This book, despite the editorial description on this page, is entirely about hardware/software integration as it pertains to managing acquisition risk for the buyer and the processes and procedures that need to be employed by the developer.

If you work within the framework of the FDA's General Principles of Software Validation or the FAA's DO-178B for safety-critical avionics the material is consistent with these governing documents, but is too outdated to be useful.

However, if you are working on integrated projects that are unregulated with respect to government controls you may find this book useful. It contains a wealth of useful guidelines for establishing and managing processes to support development of products that are based on embedded software or hardware/software integration, The core of this book is a collection of templates that were developed and proven in the DoD industry, and are designed to manage integrated testing, failure management and field feedback. Each element is applicable to commercial environments, especially for companies that are manufacturing intelligent network devices, data storage systems and specialty products such as digital control systems, sensors and other integrated hardware/software products.

The templates are introduced in Chapter 1, and each of the seven functional areas covered by the templates are discussed in separate chapters. These functional areas are: integrated testing, failure reporting, design limits, product life, test/analyze/fix process, uniform test reporting and field feedback. A chapter on applying these follows, but the material is slanted towards DoD issues. If you apply thought and imagination while reading this chapter you should get ideas on how to refactor the cases into your own environment.

Section 2 devotes three chapters to software design and test, which are based on the older waterfall development life cycle. However, this particular life cycle lends itself well to developing embedded systems, making this material valid and applicable to commercial environments.

Overall, this is a useful book for the intended audience I cited above if you can track down a copy. In particular, the checklists and overall framework are valuable, and much can be learned from the risk-based approach taken in the book.

Shifting Gears. Although I'll inevitably return to quality and reliability, I am going to shift to another topic in my next entry: XML. Also, most of the topics for the next few weeks will be in the form of book reviews instead of the tutorials and news items that we've been writing about. That will change as soon as things stabilize. We're all busy and haven't the time to do the research we normally do, nor the freedom to craft original essays on topics that are dear to us. That will change in due time, but until then please bear with us.