Last post I discussed the benefits of software but highlighted the schedule hit that in can impose upfront. The good news is for many products, adding software update will actually accelerate the schedule. The products that can benefit have one or more of the following characteristics:

• Moderate to high complexity
• Medium to high volume
• Involve several different devices working together
• Require operation across a wide and dynamic set of operating environments
• Have significant communication requirements with other devices

If your product has one or more these characteristics, the time required to implement remote software upgrade upfront will quickly pay for itself it the ability to make changes faster and quicker as the product proceeds through test and integration and out into the marketplace.

For example, higher volume products will highlight software issues more readily. If a software glitch occurs 1% of the time, an engineer at their desk never sees it. Whereas when 10,000 or 100,000 are built it turns into the game Whack-a-Mole. While every attempt is made to find and fix issues before the product is released, as the number of devices increase it becomes a tradeoff between the time to find more and more challenging bugs and the need to get the product to market. The cost of manual reprogramming a large number of devices is expensive, time consuming, and a distraction. Remote software upgrade quickly pays for itself in these situations.

No individual feature generates as much discussion as remote software update. This is because by its very nature remote software update needs to be thoroughly thought thru and executed, followed by extensive testing to verify it works as expected. There is nothing worse than creating a dead product because the upgrade process failed. That takes time – the number priority on every project. he challenge is that if a product is going to incorporate remote software upgrade. It needs to be the very first feature. No one will benefit more from it more than the developers – they are constantly upgrading. The rub comes that when the project is kicked off and a period of time has passed, someone will ask how the software is coming. And the conversation goes something like – “Great; we can now load software into the device.” “Yes, but what does it do?” “Well you can load software”…and then there is quiet. While there is nothing more powerful than the ability to remotely upgrade the software, you have to be willing to live through the hump created at the beginning. For those who do the benefits can be huge.

On a recent project, remote software upgrade was an absolute requirement. The client put the time and effort in. When they rolled the devices out at their biggest event of the year, they were able upgrade the 1,000’s of devices at the event on the spot with the latest code. The new rollout was a complete success. If they did not have the ability to upgrade, the code would have been based on that released to manufacturing several months earlier. The time between the manufacturing release and the event was used to optimize the system performance in order to handle the larger number devices at the event.

Turnaround projects are a major part of our business. We refer to a common theme we see in these projects as the Groundhog Day Effect. The plot in the movie Groundhog Day has Bill Murray’s character reliving the same day over and over. In the case of turnaround projects, the effect is “we are almost there, we will be done at the end of the week.” Several months later, the same story is being repeated. These are clearly frustrating situations for everyone involved. Our job has been to break that cycle and push the project across the finish line.

How do we do that? It takes two parties to make that happen. The hard part is to break the belief that it will be done shortly and understanding there are most likely fundamental issues that need addressing – whether that is in technology, resources, or commitment. That means stopping, regrouping and developing an achievable plan. In these cases, our job is to understand why the project is “stuck” and to develop a game plan for getting it unstuck and moving forward again. We have done this many times and are very confident we can make it happen. Nothing is more important than getting finished and creating a success. The only way to do that is to first realize you are in the Groundhog Day Effect.

I hope to use this blog to share our experiences about the design services business and the building and development of electronic products. We have found that many projects face the same decision points regardless of the application or industry. The blog offers an opportunity for us to comment about those situations and hopefully provide you some insight as you develop your products.

The challenge for us is Wavetrix is a bunch of engineers, not writers, and therefore creating blog posts does not necessarily rank high on the priority list. My job will be to push us to add to the blog as we learn about changes in technology, product development, and the marketplace.