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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Figure It Out: Effective Collaboration Tools for Post-COVID-19 Engineering
As far as engineers in the electronics industry go, I’m still on the young side, with 10 years of experience compared to the veterans of the industry. I’ve been around long enough, however, to understand firsthand the struggles that organizations (large and small) go through when they’re designing their own electronics. I’ll bet my last 555 timer that a lot of you have run into these scenarios: the Wizard, the Wishful, and the Wise. These scenarios are exaggerated for the points I’m going to make, but they’re designed to resonate with the experienced.
The Wizard is the sole master of all things electronics for the organization. The Wizards write the standards, maintain the library, take every design from idea to assembly, and nothing happens on the design side without their input. They are the lone keeper and are never questioned, and they’re three years away from retiring. They have found themselves as one of the organization’s largest assets and greatest weaknesses.
The Wishful understand that there can’t be a lone expert. Either from growing the company to include a team of engineers or addressing the issues of only having the Wizard, they’re ready to move on. Shared drives, databases, PLM systems, business tools are starting to join the repertoire, and the complexities of managing the data are becoming real. The data has a home, but the systems haven’t evolved yet, and communication isn’t all it should be.
Throwing component libraries on a shared drive is a nice first step, but then who maintains them? Design files living on Google Drive work great, as long as two people don’t try to access them at the same time. Whose work gets overwritten? The checklist for what goes into a design release exists but is it enforced? The curse of the Wishful is access to enough tools to taste collaboration, but the knowledge that there has to be a better way. Addressing the pitfalls of the added complexity with teamwork on complex projects requires some more modern approaches.
At AltiumLive 2019, I attended a talk by Ari Mahpour that focused on the concept of using software development techniques for hardware development. The three main themes he presented lodged themselves in my brain, and I’ve never gone back: standardization, automation, and visibility.
The Wise understand that when there are a lot of stakeholders on a design, and the success will be determined by how effectively communication can be managed and maintained. Mahpour’s process involved automating the outputs from the design environment, using a version control system, and decoupling the designer from the responsibility of sharing designs (Figure 1). I’m a firm believer that the more eyes are on a project, the better the outcome will be, as long as you can effectively manage the voices.
Figure 1: Revision control.
A major element of modern version control systems is issue tracking and commenting (Figure 2). Allowing stakeholders to comment on the specific problems and link those comments exactly to the portion of the design where they occur is an incredible advantage of Mahpour’s system. Removing the responsibility of the designer to translate everyone’s emails, verbal corrections, calls, and mockups back to the design adds tremendous efficiency.
Figure 2: Commenting.
Software can be developed without any one person understanding every line of code because the interfaces are standardized, the checks are automatic (hopefully), and perhaps most unfair to hardware developers, it doesn’t cost anything to press the compile button. I frequently tease my firmware engineer that his job must be easy because he can always recompile when he makes a mistake. A hardware “compile” can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars.
How do organizations close the gap between the Wishful and the Wise and leverage the expertise of the Wizard? Mahpour’s solution is tried and proven but clearly geared toward people who are already proficient with professional software development techniques. You can make the software do anything you want, and when you know, you write software. What about the hardware folks? Altium approached me with an interesting solution to this problem about a year ago when we were invited to take their cloud collaboration tool for a spin. We’re an Altium house anyway, so it made sense to look at this first.
For cloud-based tools to be effective for collaboration (not distraction) for hardware development, we have to evaluate it against the criteria that make it useful for software development:
- Does it increase visibility into the design?
- Does it provide an efficient system for communication
- Can multiple people work on the design simultaneously?
This isn’t an Altium review, but I shared my thoughts and experiences with the Altium 365 platform that addresses exactly these concerns during the AltiumLive 2020 keynote with my favorite board fabricator and assembler.
The main thing I’d like to convey here is that the ideal electronics development organization combines the experience of the Wizard, with the file-sharing of the Wishful. The Wise add in a system to manage communication, and this is perhaps the most important aspect of an efficient engineering team.
Access, communication efficiency, and visibility are the most important things that cloud collaboration tools bring to the hardware development process. I’m always interested in helping organizations tackle problems; it’s what we do every day. Please feel free to reach out to me directly at dugan.karnazes@velocityresearch.co.
Dugan Karnazes is the founder and CEO of Velocity Research.
More Columns from Figure It Out
Figure It Out: Closing the Gap Between College and Industry with PCEAFigure It Out: Field-Programmable Battery Array (Unsolved)