If you develop products for the automotive or other safety critical arenas, you already know what I am talking about.
Soon to be gone are the days where you can hire a group of talented, inexperienced, and outsourced engineers to crank out as much logic as fast as possible to meet aggressive product deadlines. Although, there are going to be pockets of project that operate this way, these practices will eventually prove to fail because they create myriads of systemic product issues that intermittently occur in the field or while getting there.
A good look at automotive safety standards, like ISO26262 will expose all the neglected development processes that are required for a product to achieve the required levels of functional safety. Why and how do these additional development process callouts in these standards improve product quality?
First the why:
1. System logic behaviors become highly deterministic because of several factors.
2. Undesirable systemic issues are practically eliminated.
Next the how:
Development processes ensure that the system logic:
1. is clean,
2. performs under a strict set well defined and unambiguous requirements,
3. has been iteratively refined until it meets a specific test standard.
So, what are some of the additional workloads required to meet product safely standards during development
1. Product specifications
2. Product testing
3. Ongoing monitoring and refinement of the development process
4. Ongoing team training and refinement on how to apply safety standards during product development.
These are not one-time tasks that are done and marked as complete. These epics are never ending, ongoing tasks with milestones, that extend throughout a product's life cycle.
From a resource point of view, completing these tasks and monitoring them requires skilled labor and "super teams" that have been trained on how to design to meet these standards.
The additional upfront costs of adhering to these standards may be high, but proportionally, when safety critical function management has lives, reputation, and steep regulatory fines at stake, they are not that expensive overall.
Introducing our solution to achieving a higher product development standard: DFMEA Firmware Developers Kit (DFDK ). DFDK will help get your team to the finish line by eliminating the costly mistakes made by ignoring or pushing critical design and process considerations out till near the end of a project. We can show how this can be achieved with minimal upfront costs.