Page 205 - The Art of Designing Embedded Systems

192 THE ART OF DESIGNING EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

Evolution is a great thing. Perhaps the firmware industry will mature
as new generations of people learn to do things correctly, and then slowly
replace the dinosaurs now all too often at the top.

Managing the Feedback Loop
The last step in most projects is the one we dread the most-assign-
ing the blame. Who is responsible for the late delivery? Why didn’t we
meet the specification document? Who let costs spiral out of control?
The developers, that’s who. When management sheds blame like a
duck repels water, we wonder why we got into such an unforgiving
profession.
Something happened in this country in the past couple of decades,
something scary for the future. We’ve become intolerant of failure. In
1967 a horrible fire consumed the Apollo 1 spacecraft and three astro-
nauts. An investigation found, and corrected, numerous problems. There
was never a serious question about carrying on.
In the 1980s, when the Challenger blew up, commentators asked
what NASA was doing to ensure that such a tragedy would never happen
again. Huh? Sitting on 6 million pounds of explosive and you want a guar-
antee that the system was foolproof? Even my car is not totally reliable.
There are no guarantees, yet society seems to expect miracles from us, the
technology gurus.
Consider the Superconducting Supercollider. If scientists could
promise a practical result, or perhaps only promise finally resolving the
issue of the Higgs particle, then maybe the SSC would be something more
than an abandoned hole in the ground. Fear of failure sent the politicians
fleeing. Yes, it was very, very expensive. I was angered, though, by the
national lack of understanding that, in science, failure is an element of
success. We learn by trying a lot of things; with luck, a few pan out. From
each defeat we have the possibility of crawling toward success.
As developers, we’ve got to learn to manage both failure and success.
Our companies are demanding more from us every day. Downsizing and
increasingly frenetic time-to-market pressures mean that Joe Engineer
must take advantage of every opportunity to learn.
Yet there is no Embedded University. We’re mostly educated
via OJT, a haphazard and inefficient way of learning. Few of us are privi-
leged to work with a mentor of stature, so the best we can do is to exam-
ine the results of everything we do, with a critical, unbiased eye toward
improving our skills, and improving the processes used to develop our
products.