In recent years, interest in engineering design automation across multiple industries skyrocketed, especially due to the high return on investment (ROI). Relieving your engineers from tedious, error-prone tasks and directing them toward automation presents a fantastic...
Integration and Workflow
How Workflow Integration Boosts Engineering Productivity
How to solve the problem that hides in plain sight Engineers rarely talk about “workflow integration” for items like CAD files or project data management (PDM). They’re too busy doing their jobs! However, that exact mindset presents a major issue. Many engineers think...
SPK Wins 2020 Managed Service Provider Award
We are thrilled to announce that SPK and Associates won the Channel Futures / Channel Partners 2020 Managed Service Provider (MSP) 501 Award for a second consecutive year! This prestigious award is widely viewed as the most comprehensive global survey of Information...
Flexible Continuous Integration Pipelines With CD
What is a Continuous Integration Pipeline? The purpose of a continuous integration pipeline is to allow teams to constantly integrate and build software updates in order to quicken release cycles, lower costs, and reduce risks. In a simple implementation of a...
Improve your build/test/deployment with CloudBees CD (formerly Electric Cloud Flow)
Repeatability is an intuitive aspect of daily life. If you throw a ball up, it comes down. If you throw it up twenty times, the same thing will happen, up and then down twenty times. When repeatability doesn’t occur and it’s supposed to, we get anxious. ...
Streamline Business Communication with Google Forms
Have you ever sent out an email with a bunch of important questions and received a reply that began with "my answers are in blue". Have you then found yourself combing through your large email searching for those answers only to discover that your email provider...
SilkTest Integration with PTC Integrity Test Management
Overview In this blog post and video, Carlos Almeida explains how to launch SilkTest Classic or Open Agent test cases from within PTC Integrity (now PTC Windchill RV&S). Pass/Fail verdicts are automatically captured and reported within Integrity Test Session.
Continuous Integration Best Practices—Part 2
As I noted in "Continuous Integration Best Practices—Part 1" there are 10 best practice principles associated with Continuous Integration and in this previous article, we looked at the first three. For part 2, we pick up where we left off and talk about principles...
Puppet Quickstart Guide (Part 1)
Puppet is the most well-known configuration management tool in the DevOps world and used by systems administrators to centrally manage large numbers of servers and computer systems. There are several Puppet quickstart guides online. However, these guides are...
Puppet Quick Setup Guide (Part 2) – How to Configure Puppet Master
Recently I explained how to easily set up communication between a Puppet client and master. In this follow up post I’ll outline the steps involved in configuring the Puppet master to control the client machine. Starting out with Puppet does not have to be a...
Three Monotonous Tasks That Are Killing Morale In Your Software Engineering Team
In the engineering world, there’s no underestimating how hard it is to attract and retain top talent. Finding qualified candidates is hard enough. But you want to go one better than that. You want to attract talent that gives your organization a competitive edge. Once...
Five Reasons to Outsource Compute Farm and Server Management
The paradigm of computing resource configurations have changed several times of the last 40 years. From mainframes to mini computers, through desktops and file servers to server farms, software as a service and the cloud. Any company that uses server farms or...