If you've spent any significant amount of time in the world of DevOps and Agile software development practices, you've likely encountered the terms Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD). For several years, I've had these terms thrown around me...
The last time SPK and Associates co-founder Chris McHale spoke with PLM expert Oleg Shilovitsky, they discussed the difficulty of BOMs across engineering disciplines and across the product lifecycle. Here is their next discussion on the latest PLM news and trends...
By now you have probably seen literally dozens of articles I’ve written on PTC Integrity Lifecycle Manager, talking about the ins and outs of various pieces of functionality. Today I thought it was time to go into greater detail on documents and how they are...
In my previous article, I define and compare the two software development practices of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. The two practices are complementary and potentially overlapping, but at least their names give us the hint that they are distinct. If...
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...
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...
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...