Is Your Project in Trouble?
Sporadic Issues Deep-Dive
Taking system timing aspects into account from the earliest phase of the real-time systems development life cycle is the most effective and efficient way to reliably master the real-time behavior of such systems. In the very early phases, the number of degrees of freedom for selecting a proper architecture variant is much larger than in later phases, as the efforts related to changing architectures increase steeply with the amount of implementation work that is already done. With that in mind, system architectures can be developed right from the beginning in a way that fully covers all timing aspects along with all functional aspects. This is exactly the reason why INCHRON strongly recommends following this approach whenever possible.
In real life, however, things could happen that inevitably result in significant deviations from the ideal approach: Development projects may start late, as key people continue to be very busy with preceding projects that determine the cashflow in the near future. Companies might enter an arena late, such that it is already full of competitors. Priorities of development projects may have to be changed, or project schedules may have to be compressed all of a sudden for a better alignment with actual market demands. In all these circumstances, there is a lot of pressure to quickly make a significant footprint in the market, which at least means developing an early prototype that will impress customers and demonstrate to the world that these companies are determined to win in this market.
And how about the safety, precision, and robustness aspects, such as timing? Well, all of this is temporarily prioritized down, as these aspects are usually not considered to be important elements of an early prototype – while the rest of the world would assume that series production will start soon, just based on the existence of that exact same prototype. Hence, the disaster inevitably runs its course as these systems have to be made safe, precise and robust late in the project by addressing all open issues individually and within the confines of a nearly frozen architecture. If the architecture is not designed to be robust, it will need to be adjusted during the implementation phase or workarounds will be used that make maintenance difficult. In many cases, the initial project time schedules are already blown at this point.
Workshop Concept
Whatever the reasons are for a never-ending series of sporadic issues popping up on the way towards series production, we at INCHRON do not leave you alone. We developed a workshop concept called Sporadic Issues Deep-Dive that helps your team to identify the most effective way forward. More often than not, sporadic issues can be traced back to system timing issues, even if this might not be immediately apparent.
For Real-Time Systems Engineering Projects That Suffer From:
- Problems that are caused by the (infrequent) coincidence of certain events, and / or
- Problems that are caused by sharing of hardware resources (processor, bus, memory) among different applications, and / or
- Problems that are very difficult to trace back to their respective root causes, and / or
- Problems that are very difficult to reproduce, and / or
- Bug fixes creating new problems that are very difficult to predict, whereas the new issues would likely fall into one of the categories listed above.
Target Audience
- Architects, lead architects
- Line managers of development departments
- Project and program managers
Objectives
Joint review of the most critical sporadic issues in terms of timing aspects
- Understand how timing aspects affect the system behavior
- Understand the essentials of timing as a complexity-driven system aspect
Development of project-specific recommendations regarding
- how to analyze sporadic issues systematically
- how to identify the root causes efficiently
- how to perform systematic tests to proactively identify timing issues that may not even have been noticed yet
- how to bring a troubled project back on track
Our Expertise
We have the right skills and experience to help you stabilize your project as quickly and smoothly as possible. The Sporadic Issues Deep-Dive workshop will be led by INCHRON engineers who have many years of professional experience and in-depth expert knowledge in the following areas:
- Timing-centric design, analysis, test, and optimization of real-time systems
- Automotive standards like AUTOSAR CP/AP and Functional Safety
- Industrial development of complex embedded real-time systems for mass markets
- Project management based on world-wide standards; assessment and recovery of troubled projects.