Challenges of Agile Product Development

In the adoption of Agile project management practices to the development of hardware or combined hardware-software engineering projects, and the adaptations to common Agile techniques that may be applied for best results with hardware projects, let’s consider some of the challenges that may be faced and how you might address them.

For example, do you develop software and firmware only after you’ve developed and assembled an iteration of physical prototype hardware? Or do you develop an iteration of your software and firmware concurrently with the development and assembly of the corresponding hardware and use other methods such as simulation to stand in for the hardware until an iteration of the physical hardware is ready?

When using Agile project management techniques, it is desirable to be able to rapidly produce and demonstrate a working prototype of your technology and to rapidly iterate and refine and build on each prototype without necessarily having a perfectly engineered product ready to go at the first iteration.

When you’re working with hardware, however, you need to deal with the lead time required to source components, to fabricate printed circuit boards, to have prototype layouts assembled by an external pick-and-place assembly contractor or to have custom plastics injection-moulded and so on.

What if the lead-time required for these processes is longer than the time allocated to a particular iteration or sprint? These types of external supply and manufacturing dependencies are unique to hardware, and aren’t present in software development – so they present a unique challenge when trying to apply agile methods to the management of hardware projects.

While these constraints may seem like a daunting challenge to adoption of Agile in the hardware engineering industry, techniques and tools such as in-house rapid prototyping, 3D printing, CNC milling of simple PCBs and the like present part of a potential solution, allowing for rapid, agile iteration of hardware prototypes.A prototype iteration of a hardware system doesn’t have to physically involve hardware, either. Simulation and visualisation tools can play a valuable role of validating the design and performance of all the components that come together into a new product, even before a prototype is actually physically constructed. FPGAs and logic synthesis may also be valuable tools here, allowing for validation of soft cores before physical hardware is constructed.

One of the challenges for combined software and hardware development is that software can normally be developed fairly rapidly and the development broken down into smaller iterative chunks. Hardware, on the other hand, may require months to show a working component or feature, which has been implemented starting from scratch.

If the software development must wait for the hardware to be created before final testing, this can create significant testing delays. Hardware must also often follow strictly defined process models, meet compliance standards, and it can be difficult to make late changes to hardware. This means that feature creep can be difficult and expensive in hardware engineering, although Agile methods are traditionally more accepting of “feature creep” compared to traditional “waterfall” management methods.

Traditionally, the priority for embedded software, for example, would be to write the hardware drivers first, to allow evaluation of the new device and to allow testing. Testing is more complex when software must fit within a small, cheap microcontroller with limited resources in an embedded system, with timing well controlled to prevent race conditions and other timing issues. This means that at some point testing on the actual hardware is generally important.

A problem often seen when businesses who create hardware and the software that runs it face when trying to “go Agile” is that they attempt to take methods and practices developed for software (such as Scrum, an Agile project management framework), and try to use it for everything, including hardware development.

Scrum is based upon “sprints” of relatively short lengths (two weeks to 30 days), with highly defined tasks that must be completed during the sprint. The nature of software development makes this an excellent framework for rapid progress; but scrum isn’t necessarily the best framework for hardware development. If the products are in a highly regulated industry, such as medical or aviation hardware, then the documentation must follow industry requirements for specification and design, as well as normal testing and functional requirements documentation.

This makes it extremely difficult to use scrum by itself, since the processes for hardware are frequently much more rigid, defined, and design-oriented than those normally defined by scrum.

On the software side, because software must interface, communicate with, and control hardware, development issues using Agile are more complex for combined software/hardware projects, and the stories (definition of the functions for a specific feature) that the developers define for each sprint are accordingly more complex. Large projects with large amounts of hardware and software dependencies can be even more challenging.

One method of dealing with hardware that isn’t ready to test is to decouple software and hardware development, via an abstraction layer, to allow software development to continue more rapidly. Can the interfaces to the hardware module be specified, and the specifics abstracted away to allow other parts of the hardware and software development to continue around the hardware component that is behind schedule?

The challenge is to find a method that allows the rapid development of software with concurrent development of the hardware, that can best meet the requirements of each process. A good approach can be the use of different Agile techniques for hardware projects than those used in software projects. Agile techniques are not abandoned – simply implemented a little differently, with different specific Agile techniques chosen for the most effective results.

With Commitment-Based Project Management (CBPM), which has been described as an “agile without using Agile” technique with broad applicability outside the software engineering sector, the emphasis is on the delivery of at least a component or piece of the hardware that works, in the case of an embedded computing or other combined hardware-software project, in order to allow the development or testing of the software that will work on that hardware component.

This is very different from the traditional “waterfall” project management approach, where the entire hardware system needs to be built first. While the “scrum” method for software projects is based on sprints with small portions of the software completed at a time, hardware development can benefit from a different approach.

With Agile, both hardware and software features are broken down into smaller chunks – only the Agile methodology can be a bit different for each. Once software is working, it can be deployed either on any available hardware modules that are ready, or in a test or simulation environment.

This allows the early identification and fixing of race issues and bugs that arise, and reduces the amount of “fixing” and lengthy hours reworking that must occur during late integration and testing when the hardware is ready.

And that’s the goal of successful agile development – to reduce the total time required, decreasing errors, mistakes and the chances of unforseen events, which will increase the time to market for your new or revised product.

Here at the LX Group you can leverage our product development expertise and experience for your total benefit. Our consultants, engineers and experts in many fields can guide you to your goal of product success.

To get started, join us for an obligation-free and confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

LX is an award-winning electronics design company based in Sydney, Australia. LX services include full turnkey design, electronics, hardware, software and firmware design. LX specialises in embedded systems and wireless technologies design.

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.

Easily extend your products to the IoT with Arrayent

The Arrayent Connect Platform is an Internet-of-Things platform that enables you to connect your products to smartphone and Web applications, providing the value-add of cloud services and IoT connectivity with low cost and simplicity, particularly aimed at existing manufacturers of appliances and consumer electronics who want to add the value of Internet-of-Things connectivity into their existing products.

Arrayent’s IoT platform has been optimised to maximise your product’s value by keeping extra hardware costs at a minimum, keeping devices simple, and pushing the majority of the IoT complexity to the cloud where possible.

By ensuring that product installation “just works” and is friendly for end users. Arrayent’s plug-and-play installation process is designed to maximise customer satisfaction and reduce the costs of customer support for installation.

Arrayent also aim to support strong scalability to as many as millions of devices. Therefore with the Arrayent IoT platform you can reliably and securely connect your products to the Internet for the same service cost, whether you’re connecting ten thousand devices or ten million.

There are four key components that make up the Arrayent Connect IoT platform – the Arrayent Connect Cloud, the Arrayent Connect Agent, the Arrayent mobile framework, and the Arrayent data analytics service.

The Arrayent Connect Cloud is essentially a cloud-based Internet-of-Things operating system, and it is the heart of the Arrayent IoT platform. The Connect Cloud hosts your virtual device, the digital copy of your physical device to which your mobile apps connect. In this fashion, complex application code can reside in the cloud, enabling reduced overall product cost and maximising product extensibility.

Arrayent Connect Cloud supports a growing list of services that are common across all Internet of Things applications. These services make it easy to functionality to your connected products, which adds value to the lives of your connected customers.

The growing lists of features that add value to and extend the functionality of your products include alerts, over-the-air firmware updates, time series storage for data analysis, data services, user account management and more.

The Arrayent Connect Agent helps embedded developers to bring reliable connected products to market, functioning as a firmware module that manages your device’s session with the Arrayent Cloud and abstracts these responsibilities away from your embedded development team – enabling you to focus your resources on delivering a great product experience to your customers, with the emphasis being on developing a great product, not spending all your resources just on the IoT and cloud connectivity infrastructure.

The Arrayent Connect Agent currently supports Wi-Fi, ZigBee, and Z-Wave local- and personal-area networks and computing platforms from major silicon vendors such as Broadcom, Texas Instruments and Marvell, running operating systems such as Linux or FreeRTOS. And because of the cross-platform design of the Connect Agent, Arrayent can quickly spin up support for other platforms if a customer need exists.

The mobile framework for Arrayent’s Internet-of-Things platform helps mobile app developers to rapidly bring intuitive, reliable mobile apps to market for IoT connectivity with devices. The framework abstracts away the complexities involved with using the lower-level web service API and interfaces of Arrayent’s machine-to-machine Internet-of-Things platform into a more friendly presentation layer so that mobile developers can focus on building unique, branded user interfaces for your products.

The Arrayent Data Analytics service delivers business intelligence reports common to all your products, such as device locations, interaction between devices and apps, peak usage trends, and more. Arrayent’s “Data Mart” services aggregate, normalise and filter your device data for connectivity with your existing analytics solutions.

However, careful communication with consumers and market research is likely to be important here, as consumers are likely to be unhappy with any trend towards Internet-of-Things home automation and consumer electronic appliances “spying” on the consumer – even through behaviour such as turning lights on or opening garage doors at certain times – and transmitting that information back to the vendor for the purpose of business intelligence analytics without any obvious value, safeguards and control returned to the consumer.

The Arrayent platform supports over-the-air downloads for firmware updates to devices and network gateways, allowing embedded devices to always maintain the latest updates for optimal functionality and security into the future.

Furthermore, with the Arrayent firmware download management application you can control the safe delivery and phased release of new firmware to the network, even in large-scale networks with hundreds of thousands of connected devices.

Arrayent’s IoT cloud platform typically achieves end-to-end response times of about 200 to 400 milliseconds out to the Internet and back again, providing low latency for your connected devices. The platform is hosted across redundant servers mirrored across geographically separated data centres.

If a hardware or network failure takes down one server, the data is still available at other locations, providing confidence that the Internet-of-Things connectivity cloud for your products is reliable. The platform supports alerts via email, SMS, iOS and Android push notifications and more, in response to programmable triggers from virtually any input data stream. Alerts can also trigger response actions in the product that generated the alert, or in other connected devices on the network.

All of this means there exists another option, another choice, another system to get your Internet-of-Things ideas from your notebook to reality. And doing just that with any system may seem like an impossible task.

However with our team here at the LX group, it’s simple to get prototypes of your devices based on the Arrayent platform up and running – or right through to the final product. We can partner with you – finding synergy with your ideas and our experience to create final products that exceed your expectations.

To get started, join us for an obligation-free and confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

LX is an award-winning electronics design company based in Sydney, Australia. LX services include full turnkey design, electronics, hardware, software and firmware design. LX specialises in embedded systems and wireless technologies design.

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.

Tools for Agile Hardware Development Success

When using Agile project management techniques, it is desirable to be able to rapidly produce and demonstrate a working prototype of your technology, and to rapidly iterate and refine and build on each prototype without necessarily having a perfectly engineered product ready to go at the first iteration.

When attempting to apply Agile methods to electronic and hardware design, what methodologies and tools should we consider in order to rapidly prototype and demonstrate hardware systems?

What if the lead time that is required to source components, to fabricate PCBs, to have prototype layouts assembled by an external pick-and-place assembly contractor or to have custom plastics injection-moulded, and so on, is longer than the time allocated to an iteration? These types of external supply and manufacturing dependencies are unique to hardware, and aren’t present in software development – so they present a unique challenge when trying to apply agile methods to the management of hardware projects.

Increasingly popular and accessible tools and technologies such as small-scale CNC milling, 3D printing, and laser cutting are becoming more important in this field, allowing components such as custom plastics to be rapidly prototyped, rapidly demonstrated to the product owner, evaluated, and rapidly iterated, prior to committing to the high cost and high lead time of custom injection-moulding tooling and manufacturing.

In agile methodology, early user testing is important, with rapid feedback focussing the most important characteristics of a product and showing what is or isn’t relevant for customers. To shorten the time required to deliver a prototype iteration, rapid prototyping tools and technologies such as 3D printing are ideal, bringing rapid, small-scale and very agile manufacturing technologies right to the desktop.

Having intimate, agile communication between different team members with different skills – electronic engineers, mechanical engineers, industrial designers, UI designers, software developers, manufacturing experts – with regular meetings, standups and interaction is also good for efficiency and agility, allowing cross-pollination of different experience and ideas and providing confidence in the integration between different parts – between a plastic moulding and a printed circuit board, for example – preventing time-consuming problems with manufacturability later.

If you’re working on a hardware prototype in an agile environment and your external manufacturing of a new prototype board, for example, is going to take longer than the time allocated to an iteration but you need a prototype ready to demonstrate, what options are available to you?

Then it is time to ask if there is anything that you can do so that you can produce a prototype of some kind in an iteration, using the new tools and technologies of rapid prototyping – or even the older technologies of hand construction. Today there are services that can allow you to upload design files for a new 3D printed plastic part or CNC machined metal part and have it manufactured and shipped overnight so that it is ready to go the next morning. These services can be expensive – but so is the time of your team, and the agility that such rapid iteration provides could be more valuable.

A prototype iteration of a hardware system doesn’t have to physically involve hardware, either. Simulation and visualisation tools, such as SPICE for electronic engineering, 3D rendering of PCB component dimensions, 3D rendering of mechanical components, and thermodynamics models for predicting heat transport with a device enclosure, for example, can all play an important role in assuring the quality, interoperability, industrial design, electrical and thermal performance and the “look and feel” of all the components that come together into a new product – even before a prototype is actually physically constructed.

Nevertheless some of the most rapid of rapid prototyping strategies can fail, so is there a different way to somehow produce something at each iteration that can generate the discussion, answers and feedback you can use to drive decision-making within a single iteration?

What are the basic, smallest chunks of hardware functionality that you can deliver? Can you split the hardware prototype up into small modules, for optimum agility and the ability to deliver a prototype of at least one module during each iteration period?

Using standard off-the-shelf components and technology for rapid prototyping can play a valuable role here, along with breadboard-style construction, the use of manufacturer evaluation boards and reference-design boards from chipset and IC manufacturers, the use of general-purpose “building blocks” and “breakout boards” from component distributors, and general-purpose single-board computer and microcontroller modules, which are relatively low cost, flexible, and very easy to learn to use.

The use of Open Hardware and open-source intellectual property, for example for known working circuit designs that can be re-used without having to spend your time reinventing the wheel, is also potentially attractive here.

Today, almost all electronic products and designs incorporate some kind of software or firmware – for an embedded microcontroller, for Internet-connected cloud services or mobile apps or for PC connectivity, for example. This is especially true as we move further into the emerging Internet-of-Things era.

This means there is a relationship between electronic engineering and software engineering for almost all products, and agile methods can help to make this interaction most efficient. Once software is working, it can be deployed either on any available hardware modules that are ready, or in a test or simulation environment. This allows the early identification and fixing of most race-condition issues or bugs that may arise, and reduces the amount of “fixing” and time intensive reworking that otherwise might need to occur later into the integration process.

The goal is efficient, concurrent work with hardware developers creating hardware components, and software developers developing and testing software components, at first independently of the hardware development at times, and then testing on the actual hardware prototypes as they are developed. This requires effective collaboration between hardware engineers, industrial designers, software developers, and the product owners who provide the feedback.

No matter the level of expertise within your organisaiton – you may need help or guidance with any or all stages of product development. Here at the LX Group we have a wide range of experience in various development methodologies and can be your partner for success.

To get started, join us for an obligation-free and confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

LX is an award-winning electronics design company based in Sydney, Australia. LX services include full turnkey design, electronics, hardware, software and firmware design. LX specialises in embedded systems and wireless technologies design.

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.

Cloud-based IoT with Meshworks

The MeshWorks Internet-of-Things platform from California Eastern Laboratories is a turnkey wireless solution which connects sensors and peripherals to the cloud in a way that makes previously complex mesh networks and wireless sensor networks very fast and easy to implement.

This includes connectivity between the wireless mesh network, the LAN, the Internet and cloud services, for anyone with rudimentary Python scripting skills. The complete MeshWorks platform consists of three key components – a wireless Personal Area Network (PAN) which is powered by CEL’s MeshConnect 2.4 GHz 802.15.4 radio modules, a GUI-based programming interface built around the MeshWorks software suite, and the cloud service which is facilitated by connecting your wireless sensor network to the Internet via either the MeshWorks Ethernet Gateway or the OpenTether Cellular Gateway.

CEL provides a variety of reference designs which allow you to easily get started engineering, combining the EM35x MeshConnect family of 802.15.4/ZigBee wireless modules with a multitude of different sensors and control node choices representative of those that are popular in Internet-of-Things and connected-home applications. CEL’s turnkey wireless solutions enable you to unite the “Internet of Everything” product ecosystem with ease.

The MeshWorks platform was designed specifically to address the wireless connectivity needs of the industrial and environmental sensing markets. By using CEL’s family of EM35x wireless modules in conjunction with the MeshWorks cloud service platform, virtually any sensor or control node can easily be connected to the cloud for state-of-the-art control and data analytics, allowing you to get to market quickly and easily.

Furthermore the included library of reference designs for proven hardware implementations and solutions include block diagrams, detailed schematics, bill of materials information, and much other relevant information to help you get started with a MeshWorks-based solution for your next product.

The MeshConnect line of 802.15.4/ZigBee and other radio solutions combine industry-leading transceiver ICs with other RF components such as RFIC switches and power amplifiers, providing certified and qualified solutions which enable customers to reduce their design and certification phases of development, enabling wireless connectivity for your products relatively easily.

The MeshConnect EM35x Ember Companion Kit is designed for interoperability with development kits for the Ember platform, with each radio module in this kit soldered onto a carrier board making it pin-for-pin compatible with the Ember development board. CEL’s MeshConnect EM35x Mini Modules Programming Fixture is a programming assembly designed to be used with the CEL ZICM35xSPx MeshConnect Mini Modules series, which are small mesh-networked radio modules ready for compact and relatively low cost integration into your next product, adding wireless mesh network and Internet-of-Things capability with ease.

The Mini Modules Programming Fixture is useful for production programming or during application development when multiple firmware images are required to be flashed onto a Mini Module during testing and debugging. This programming assembly needs to be used in conjunction with the ISA3 Ember Debug/Insight Adapter from Silicon Labs for the actual programming of the chips.

Another option is to use MeshConnect EM357 USB Sticks which enable hardware vendors to quickly integrate 802.15.4/ZigBee connectivity into any computer or device with a USB port, without any RF design experience required. They can be used as a hardware development platform for rapid prototyping and as a companion to the MeshConnect EM357 modules.

CEL also offers reliable Ethernet and Cellular-based gateways, providing Internet connectivity to a wireless sensor network or mesh network with a secure, low-cost solution. Based on the Mini Module line of Ember EM35x-based IEEE 802.15.4 radio transceivers from Silicon Labs, these gateways run the industry-leading EmberZNet PRO ZigBee stack.

The MeshWorks OpenTether Cellular Gateway connects a MeshWorks sensor and control network to the cloud anywhere out in the field, as long as cellular service is available in that location. These gateways can also come pre-configured to connect a MeshWorks network directly to Exosite’s cloud service, and are specifically designed to support the MeshWorks turnkey wireless solution for connecting sensor and control peripherals to the cloud.

By writing a simple python script, the gateway can be configured to connect to virtually any cloud service or database using common Internet transport protocols, with Exosite connectivity supported out of the box with a supplied reference script.

The MeshWorks OpenTether Sensor Node is also available as a part of the MeshWorks solution family, and this product is an ideal starting point for the evaluation of the MeshWorks platform. The OpenTether Sensor Node has 10 built-in sensor capabilities to enable you to quickly prototype many common sensing and automation applications. Additionally, it contains a built-in I/O expansion port that you can use to connect to any external sensor or control node using I2C, analog, or digital I/O.

The Sensor Node comes pre-loaded with CEL’s MeshWorks firmware, which allows users to quickly write Python scripts to customise the system for their particular needs. The OpenTether Sensor Node utilises CEL’s Mini Module line of Ember EM35x-based transceivers built around Silicon Labs 802.15.4 SoCs as with the other hardware products in this family, and the Sensor Node also incorporates the EmberZNet PRO ZigBee stack.

CEL’s MeshConnect EM358x Mini Modules are based on the Ember EM3588 802.15.4/ZigBee microcontroller system-on-chip from Silicon Labs. They are pin-compatible extensions to CEL’s leading product line of EM357-based radio network modules, and they are available in both low and high power output options (+8dBm and +20dBm transmit power) to accommodate designers with different range, performance and power consumption requirements.

The Silicon Labs EM3588 system-on-chip incorporates a 2.4 GHz RF transceiver with a baseband modem, a hard-wired MAC and an embedded 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller with 64 kB of internal RAM and 512 kB of flash memory. The MeshConnect EM357 High Temperature Mini Modules from CEL provide the same high performance RF solution and high performance ZigBee stack in a module that is specifically designed to address the thermal challenges associated with heat-intensive applications, based on the Ember EM357 802.15.4/ZigBee radio network system-on-chip.

MeshConnect EM357 Mini Modules offer the smallest footprint of all Ember-based RF modules available today, combined with the power of the Cortex-M3 advanced 32-bit microcontroller architecture, the strong performance of the EmberZNet PRO ZigBee stack, a link budget of up to 123 dB, and a strong surrounding ecosystem of gateways, sensor products, cloud services and reference designs for implementing your wireless sensor networks and Internet-of-Things solutions.

All of this means there exists another option, another choice, another system to get your Internet-of-Things ideas from your notebook to reality. And doing just that with any system may seem like an impossible task – however with our team here at the LX group, it’s simple to get prototypes of your devices based on the Meshworks platform up and running – or right through to the final product. We can partner with you – finding synergy with your ideas and our experience to create final products that exceed your expectations.

To get started, join us for an obligation-free and confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

LX is an award-winning electronics design company based in Sydney, Australia. LX services include full turnkey design, electronics, hardware, software and firmware design. LX specialises in embedded systems and wireless technologies design.

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.