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In recent years, discrete control systems play an important role in the development and advancement of modern civilization and technology. Practically every aspect of our life is affected by some type of control systems. This kind of system maybe classified as an embedded real-time system and requires rigorous methodologies to develop the software...
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... general, the main characteristics implemented for our induction motor simulator include: (i) the system should simulate the behavior of the motor through a mathemati- cal model; (ii) the system should reproduce the signal sup- plied PWM (for the digital soft-starter) through I/O micro- controller ports; (iii) the system should calculate and show in the display the voltage and current values based on the PWM signals supplied by the soft-starter; and (iv) a man- machine interface (display and keyboard) should be present in the final solution. Figure 1 presents an overview of the connection between the induction motor and digital soft- starter equipments. As can be seen in this figure, the soft-starter sends the PWM signals through the microcontroller's general purpose I/O (GPIO) to the induction motor simulator. ...
Citations
... Advanced technologies and tools for modelling, simulation has enabled the adoption of shorter cycles of hardware-related product development [29,30]. Research has shown several positive experience using Agile methodologies in embedded systems [31][32][33][34][35]. Greene reported a positive experience of applying Agile approaches in firmware development at Intel [31]. ...
... Research has shown several positive experience using Agile methodologies in embedded systems [31][32][33][34][35]. Greene reported a positive experience of applying Agile approaches in firmware development at Intel [31]. Cordeiro et al. proposed a new platform-based design using Agile approaches that substantially reduced development time in three hardware development projects [32]. Adopting XP practices, Santos et al. showed a successful software version created for control of a satellite camera [33]. ...
Internet of Things applications are not only the new opportunity for digital businesses but also a major driving force for the modification and creation of software systems in all industries and businesses. Compared to other types of software-intensive products, the development of Internet of Things applications lacks a systematic approach and guidelines. This paper aims at understanding the common practices and challenges among start-up companies who are developing Internet of Things products. A qualitative research is conducted with data from twelve semi-structured interviews. A thematic analysis reveals common types of Minimum Viable Products, prototyping techniques and production concerns among early stage hardware start-ups. We found that hardware start-ups go through an incremental prototyping process toward production. The progress associates with the transition from speed-focus to quality-focus. Hardware start-ups heavily rely on third-party vendors in term of development speed and final product quality. We identified 24 challenges related to management, requirement, design, implementation and testing. Internet of Things entrepreneurs should be aware of relevant pitfalls and managing both internal and external risks.
... Predictive modeling has been broadly utilized within IT enterprise environments, uses of which run from recommendation-based IT benefit conveyance and support [2], [10] to desert expectation for business software [7]. This exploration specifically goes for software effort estimation which has been examined in various software outline and development enterprises. ...
... Lean ideas, standards and practices are frequently used for consistent agile process change, with the latest presentation being the kanban approach, presenting a persistent, flow-based substitute to time-boxed agile processes. In [10], the proposed development approach adjusts agile standards and examples keeping in mind the end goal to manufacture implanted control systems concentrating on the issues identified with the framework's imperatives and wellbeing. Solid unit testing is the establishment of the proposed procedure for guaranteeing convenience and rightness. ...
... They noted that avoidance of up-front documentation, the negative effects of refactoring on hard real-time system timing and the need to cope with changes in requirements during development are obvious challenges to fully-fledged use of agile principles. Similarly, Codeiro et al. [5] propose an agile methodology namely "The next Methodology (TXM)" combining practices from XP, Scrum and organizational patterns of agile software development for embedded software development under stringent hardware constraints. However, with the proli-feration of low-cost and high performance processors and microcontrollers, this is no longer a critical issue. ...
The traditional software development model commonly named “waterfall” is unable
to cope with the increasing functionality and complexity of modern embedded systems.
In addition, it is unable to support the ability for businesses to quickly respond
to new market opportunities due to changing requirements. As a response, the software
development community developed the Agile Methodologies (e.g., extreme
Programming, Scrum) which were also adopted by the Embedded System community.
However, failures and bad experiences in applying Agile Methodologies to the
development of embedded systems have not been reported in the literature. Therefore,
this paper contributes a detailed account of our first-time experiences adopting
an agile approach in the prototype development of a wireless environment data acquisition
system in an academic environment. We successfully applied a subset of the
extreme Programming (XP) methodology to our software development using the
Python programming language, an experience that demonstrated its benefits in
shaping the design of the software and also increasing productivity. We used an incremental
development approach for the hardware components and adopted a “cumulative
testing” approach. For the overall development process management, however,
we concluded that the Promise/Commitment-Based Project Management (PBPM/CBPM)
was better suited. We discovered that software and hardware components
of embedded systems are best developed in parallel or near-parallel. We
learned that software components that pass automated tests may not survive in the
tests against the hardware. Throughout this rapid prototyping effort, factors like
team size and our availability as graduate students were major obstacles to fully apply
the XP methodology.
... As aforementioned, such an industrial-academic collaboration is focused on research areas related to mobile devices, digital TV, and industrial automation, due to industry demand. For instance, mobile device technologies (e.g., smartphones and tablets) grow every year worldwide by improving keyfeatures such as processing power and storage capacity, which results in a better support to a wide range of applications (e.g., games, social interaction and services that were previously restricted to computers only) [14], [15]. Additionally, digital TV has shaped a new application market for user's interactivity, especially in Brazil, where such technology has been recently implemented [16], which brings a new range of research and application development challenges. ...
We describe the results of an industrial-academic collaboration among the Graduate Program in Electrical Engineering (PPGEE), the Electronics and Information Research Centre (CETELI), and Samsung Eletrônica da Amazônia Ltda. (Samsung), which aims at training human resources for Samsung's research and development (R&D) areas. Inspired by co-operative education systems, this collaboration offers an academic experience by means of a complementary training programme (CTP), in order to train undergraduates and graduate students in electrical and computer engineering, with especial emphasis on digital television (TV), industrial automation, and mobile devices technologies. In particular, this cooperation has provided scholarships for students and financial support for professors and coordinators in addition to the construction of a new building with new laboratories, classrooms, and staff rooms, to assist all research and development activities. Additionally, the cooperation outcomes led to applications developed for Samsung's mobile devices, digital TV, and production processes, an increase of 37% in CETELI's scientific production (i.e., conference and journal papers) as well as professional training for undergraduates and graduate students.
... Extreme Programming (XP) is an agile software development methodology that handles rapid changes in requirements and environments in short increments and release cycles. Also XP can be described as a development method for projects where not all requirements and features of a system can be defined and planned before the development start [18]. The phases of XP model are listed below as [2]: Exploration phase -customers accumulate the requirements for the first release, then the project leader and platform owner estimate how many persons per day. ...
... There are experiments reported in specialized literature using students to compose the SCRUM teams [9], [10]. Also, there are literature reviews [11], [12] and systematic literature reviews [13], [14]. ...
Manaus, the capital city of the state of Amazonas and the sixth Brazilian largest gross domestic product, demands highly qualified hardware and software developers for consumer electronics and telecommunication sectors of its free trading zone. However, what can be viewed as an opportunity for the youth alumni of local institutions of higher education contrasts with the low level of qualification provided by such institutions. As a consequence, most positions either remain opened or are occupied by professionals from other Brazilian regions. Moreover, the issue relies more on soft skills than on hard skills, as the local institutions are aligned with International standard academic curriculum and cover modern technologies. Soft skill is the enter barrier to the job market. English proficiency, communication skill, writing (in both Portuguese and English) skill, among others, are top listed failure reasons in the hiring processes. As one project manager highlighted: “it is much cheaper and quicker for the company to fill in some specific technological gaps, than to leverage a poor English proficiency”. This paper presents a proposal of an involving activity aiming to address several soft skills at the same time, with minimal disturbance in the student daily routine. The concept is based on the impact of immersing the student in a systematic project development experience. Clear communicated project goal, where the students have specific roles, with assigned accountable peers, everything under the umbrella of an Agile-like software development process (derived from SCRUM) are in the core of the activity. This paper details the incremental implementation methodology of the program among four research areas, and 23 projects or project activities, involving 34 students. The results of the two years running program will also be described, including the increase of progress visibility by advisors, the improvement of students communication and writing skills and the qualification on SCRUM software development process tools and documentation. The authors mapped important success factors in achieving relevant improvement on students' profile, and presented a list of recommendations for the next phase of the program, including some obvious one, as the importance of the active participation of advisors, and some less obvious one, like the resistance to the Internet online tool due to daily meeting coinciding with the peak of Internet usage in the University.
... Cordeiro et al. [3] give the most detailed agile methodology for developing embedded software. They use some practices of XP and Scrum to achieve a highly iterative process. ...
Agile development processes and especially Scrum are chang- ing the state of the practice in software development. Many companies in the classical IT sector have adopted them to successfully tackle various challenges from the rapidly changing environments and increasingly complex software systems. Companies developing software for embedded or cyber-physical systems, however, are still hesitant to adopt such processes. Despite successful applications of Scrum and other agile methods for cyber-physical systems, there is still no complete process that maps their specific challenges to practices in Scrum. We propose to fill this gap by treating all design artefacts in such a development in the same way: In software development, the final design is already the product, in hardware and mechanics it is the starting point of production. We sketch the Scrum extension Scrum CPS by showing how Scrum could be used to develop all design artefacts for a cyber physical system. Hardware and mechanical parts that might not be available yet are simulated. With this approach, we can directly and iteratively build the final software and produce detailed models for the hardware and mechanics production in parallel. We plan to further detail Scrum CPS and apply it first in a series of student projects to gather more experience before testing it in an industrial case study.
... Greene [9] (study S4) describes an experience in applying agile approaches to the development of firmware for the Intel Itanium processor family. Studies S12 and S13 present the development of a digital softstarter [23] and of a induction motor simulator prototypes, respectively [24]. Besides that, studies S8 and S10 present the development of a pulse oximeter [19,21]. ...
... This method is composed of practices from "traditional" software engineering and agile methods (in particular, Scrum and XP), and aims at minimizing the main problems in software development (i.e., requirement volatility and risk management), and of practices that are needed to achieve hardware and software development. TXM was also successfully applied in industry projects [19,21,23,24]. We also found a unique primary study (study S23) that investigates a specific software development phase, i.e., requirements engineering [31]. ...
Embedded systems are widely used in diverse areas, such as avionics, consumer electronics, and medical equipments, causing a considerable impact on modern society. Since these systems sometimes deal directly with human lives, and require a considerable level of quality, their development should be subject to a rigorous process. In another perspective, agile methods (or agile processes) have been adopted by the software industry as a lightweight, iterative, and collaborative approach for developing software systems. Although agile methods do not seem to be suitable to embedded systems, they have been successfully used for building such systems. However, there exists no detailed and analytical overview of the use of such methods in the embedded systems domain. The main objective of this paper is to present a detailed view of how agile methods have been used in the development of embedded systems, and to describe their benefits, challenges, and limitations. For this, we have applied Systematic Review, a technique for systematically exploring, organizing, summarizing, and assessing potentially all works conducted in a specific research area. As the main result, we have observed that agile methods have brought advantages to embedded systems development; however, more studies should be conducted. Furthermore, this work is also intended to contribute to the identification of important new research lines.
... An improved design and modularity in code produced by TDD developers has been observed in a case study by Cordeiro et al. [37]. This conclusion is also supported by the survey results reported by George and Williams [24]. ...
Agile has been used to refer to a software development paradigm that emphasizes rapid and flexible development. In the meanwhile, we have through our practical experiences in scaling up agile methods, noticed that architecture plays an important role. Due to the inter-relationship between agile methods and architecture, as well as divergent perceptions on their correlation stated in numerous sources, we are motivated to find out how these perceptions are supported by findings in the research community in general and in empirical studies in particular. To fully benefit from agile practices and architectural disciplines, we need empirical data on the perceived and experienced impacts of introducing agile methods to existing software development process, as well as correlations between agile and architecture. In this paper, we survey the research literature for statements made regarding the relationship between agile development and software architecture. The main findings are that there is a lack of scientific support for many of the claims that are concerned with agile and architecture, and more empirical studies are needed to fully reveal the benefits and drawbacks implied by an agile software development method.
... The issue has been addressed in the past by the agile community. For example, Cordeiro et al. [4] suggested strong unit testing as the foundation of the proposed methodology for ensuring timeliness and correctness. Due to the previous challenge, however, the actual application of agility to this kind of software should be formulated carefully, especially in the hardware ramp-up stages, when the software development process is not pure development, but rather is about supporting hardware, board initialization, and stabilization. ...
In this paper we describe the application of the agile software development approach in system engineering projects. We describe the main characteristics of system projects, highlighting the challenges that the application of agility in such cases raises. Such challenges emerge due to the unique characteristics of system projects, which include the multidisciplinary nature of such projects, which encompasses, in addition to the software teams, also hardware, firmware, algorithms, and mechanics teams; the significant importance of including the project management in the process; the multiple kinds of integration tasks; the need for high-level and skilled human resources; and finally, the actual software development process, which in many system projects is embedded real-time software. Though agile development is an accepted development methodology in software projects, many questions are still unanswered when agility is applied to system projects. This paper aims to partially close this gap by addressing the application of agility in an advanced communication system project.
