The 2012 UBM Survey showed that, for the first time, QA engineers are becoming a significant portion of embedded software teams, and there is less concern about the quality of debugging tools for those teams, However, the size of those teams is, in general, dropping and concern for tool quality is still number one, all of which makes hitting schedules on time the greatest challenge for those teams. According to Dax Harfang at Electric Cloud, those pressures are even greater in hardware-centric companies who would rather not make a large investment in software QA, especially smaller companies that may be using resources around the world. Farhang stated that "homegrown" approaches are hard to manage, can be very slow, and often lack documentation that a distributed team can access. "Development teams need to address "back end" software production processes to save time, improve product quality and deliver software to market faster." New Tech Press talked with Harfang about meeting automating embedded test at the 2012 Design West Conference in San Jose.
Five companies you might have missed at ESC-SV 2011
The Embedded Systems Conference, especially the Silicon Valley edition, is an eclectic collection of cutting edge technology. This year, ESC-SV 2011 was no exception. Yes, there were the regular software, RTOS, component and design services companies, but there was also significant presence of distributors like DigiKey and element14 that were drawing a lot of attention. On the periphery of the exhibition were the companies that lack the marketing resources of the major players and while most were satisfied by the amount of customer traffic, they were a little wistful about the lack of attention they were getting from the press. Luckily for them, New Tech Press was there, and boy did we find some cool companies.
So here are five of the companies that weren’t among the usual suspects at ESC, and that you might have missed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpnjDWzPnrc