Deploying modern software applications is a complex process involving many moving parts. Adding microservices into the mix amplifies this problem by further decentralizing applications, resulting in more deployment endpoints to track. With all those IP addresses...
SPK wants to wish our growing subscriber community a Happy New Year! We’re honored to be welcomed onto your desktops and smartphones to share stories on how to make your engineering team and company work more efficiently. Perhaps more importantly, we hope any...
This week I’d like to talk in larger conceptual terms about the Software Development LifeCycle (SDLC) process and the benefits of integrating tools associated with this process. To start off, let’s identify the four kinds of tools that are important to a fully...
I'm not a programmer by trade, so I've had to force feed myself a lot of knowledge – some of it makes sense, some of it is beyond me. I've written this post to serve as an Integrity PLM Software Primer for the MKSSI Environment Variable. I hope you find it useful!...
Let’s be realistic: Windows users use Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office requires configuration. You’ve probably used the Microsoft Office Customization Tool to create Microsoft Software Patch (MSP) files to automate installation, but you should consider using...
I recently came across a forum post asking for advice on the combination of running Pro/Intralink 3.4 on Windows 7 64-bit. In short, I’m happy to report that we’ve been using this combination without incident: Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit SP1, PTC...
Recently, Oracle announced the release of Java 8. This latest edition has some interesting new features, most notably the inclusion of lambda expressions and the ability to do multiple inheritance through default methods. We’ll spend the bulk of this article exploring...
One of the major points of pain in any development process is how do you prove that the product you’ve built for the marketplace actually does everything you want it to do. The simple answer of course is “Why you test it to make sure.” But the simple answer isn’t...
Recently, a customer came to me because they wanted to record when changes were promoted from their development environment to their test environment, and later from their test environment to their production environment. They wanted a way to simply tell when changes...
Requirements management isn’t optional in many fields. Medical technology and finance are just two fields where regulatory compliance necessitates requirements management. You and other stakeholders simply must be in total agreement about the requirements of a given...
Automation isn’t just for manufacturing tasks. In fact, many of the grinding, repetitive tasks your engineers can’t stand can easily be automated out of existence. Any task that is repeatable is automatable. That means you can save big money on man hours, letting your...
I was intrigued by the information and conclusions presented in OnShape’s recent report, “The State of Product Development and Hardware Design 2019.” However, I was not as surprised as they were to hear that the biggest problem in R&D is still complex processes,...