Commercial Development Environment Research Articles

A Test-oriented Embedded System Production Methodology

In the business world, the use of Agile methodologies has been demonstrated as providing a pro-active, rather than reactive, path for the developer to create defect-free products. Although similarities exist with business desktop and line-of-business systems, the closer connection of signal processing systems to the hardware side of a product, and associated physical constraints, makes the adaption of desktop Agile methodologies for the embedded world difficult; and the adoption of these methodologies by developers problematic. We focus on our experiences in developing test frameworks to support transforming a subset of extreme programming from the world of desktop applications into a suitable embedded domain production methodology. Details are provided of the issues surrounding an Embedded xUnit testing framework that will permit development of digital signal processing applications on a wide range of standalone and multi-processor systems in research, teaching and commercial development environments.

A field study of the Wheel—a usability engineering process model

Interactive system developers are increasingly including usability engineering as an integral part of interactive system development. With recognition of the importance of usability come attempts to structure this new aspect of overall system development, leading to a variety of processes and methodologies. Unfortunately, these processes often lack flexibility, customizability, completeness, and breadth of coverage. This paper describes our development of a meta process or process model that we call the Wheel. This innovative approach to creating and tailoring usability engineering processes addresses these shortcomings, and describes an evaluation of its application in a real-world commercial development environment. The Wheel process model for usability engineering is not a process itself, but instead, it provides a general framework into which developers can fit specific existing or new techniques, methods, or activities to apply “best usability practices”. It grew out of our examination, adaptation, and extension of several existing usability engineering and software methodologies. The methods that most strongly guided creation of the Wheel were the LUCID framework of interaction design, the Star life cycle of usability engineering, and the waterfall and spiral models of software engineering. The resulting process model assumes the form of a sequence of distinct cycles (each of which produces a product form), allowing developers to focus on each cycle separately. Each cycle has the same four activity types: Analyze, Design, Implement, and Evaluate. Each activity type in a cycle is instantiated using an existing usability engineering technique. Working with an Internet technology company in northern Virginia under grant sponsorship from the Virginia Center for Innovative Technology (a research and development incubator for the Commonwealth of Virginia), we instantiated the Wheel process model and used it to develop a Web-based device management system. The process model performed remarkably well for this development environment, overcoming the tight constraints of budget and schedule cuts to produce an excellent process instance that resulted in a demonstration prototype of the company’s target system.

4 Taming the Expanding System Complexity of a Commercial Product: Embracing Systems Engineering Principles in a Commercial Development Environment

AbstractThe development momentum of complex commercial products are often choked by an interminable cycle of test and corrective action that devours and overwhelms valuable resources. The root cause of this class of problem is that traditional commercial development environments do not make use of sound Systems Engineering principles as their products mature into highly complex systems. This paper provides an account of how Fujitsu Australia's Telecommunications Research and Development (R&D) centre is exploiting the years of experience gained by the Aerospace and Defense industries, and adapting their highly tuned and proven Systems Engineering practices into the commercial development environment. The centre piece of this paper is the adopted generic Systems Engineering Model that has become the central focus of development capability maturation within the R&D centre.

Applying domain analysis and modeling

In this paper we describe our experience in applying domain analysis within a company that develops personal electronic devices. We describe how we tailored the DSSA method to suit our needs and then present the process and representations that we found most useful for this situation. The conclusions and lessons learned are useful because few studies published at this time provide details about applications of domain engineering in commercial development environments.