In this third and final installment of my three-part software engineering best practices series on code reviews, we will look at the various tools available to facilitate the code review process. We've already looked at the benefits of code reviews and why conducting...
Agile and Lean Software Development approaches came into favor in the late nineties and beginning of the 21st Century in reaction to the many issues with traditional plan-driven, heavyweight software development processes. However, many of the practices embodied in...
The value system and practices that embody Agile Software Development have been around for well over a decade, and have been touted as having "crossed the chasm" by organizations such as the Agile Alliance, Gartner, and Forrester Research. Numerous studies indicate...
Security in the 21st century is a complicated game. The good guys are always playing catch up with the bad guys. Security is particularly important for medtech companies due to their specific compliance needs. Banking and fintech likewise have a high bar for security...
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...
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,...
In our last article we talked about the four steps your organization must go through when designing secure connected medical devices. With the increasing attention paid to product security in this era of connected medical devices, many companies are scrambling to keep...
One SPK client’s design engineering team was required to email CAD files to a technician to perform 3D printing. However, the CAD files were too large for regular email transmission. The designers manually converted each CAD file into a ZIP format for sending in one...
Many of you are undoubtedly familiar with using Jira as an issue tracker. But for those of you who have been juggling issue tracking and meeting SLA requirements -- and for those of you who had the recently acquired VertygoSLA addon -- this article may be useful...
One item I’ve done repeatedly while doing network consulting services is configuring high availability (HA) networks. The recommended way is Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP). This requires that you have two firewalls for every location and they run in...
The other day, I went to a presentation of FlexPOD and was impressed. FlexPOD is a collaboration of efforts from Cisco, VMWare, and NetApp. What it offers is a highly flexible framework to grow IT datacenters they are calling Infrastructure as a service (IIAS). If...
As a provider of engineering services, the majority of my projects involve developing GWT applications, and I do all my work almost exclusively in Ubuntu. Ubuntu 12.04, specifically, has many convenient features and I highly recommend it to anyone looking to get their...