Formalize your process.
Companies often have a pretty good hardware development process in place, dealing with electrical and mechanical drawings, bills of material, and the factory floor interface. Most of these processes are in place so the manufacturing department knows what to make and how to put it together. …
Have a formal process for tracking, recording, and classifying field shipments and failure returns.
If your product was designed well in the first place, even if strict adherence to IEC 61508 was not followed, your field failure rate should be pretty low.
Using Proven-In-Use (PIU) methodology will…
While channel surfing the TV this weekend, I happened to stop on an old show called “My Mother The Car.” (Ok, I’m dating myself, but it was filmed in color, as opposed to some other favorite old shows still in black-and-white). The fictional car, a 1928 Porter built for…
How does a team get to play in the NCAA tournament? They don’t just buy plane tickets and arrive at the arena ready to play whoever else shows up. In fact, there is a rather rigorous process to determine who gets to play and what seed they are, which…
There is no shortage of drivers who try to “beat the red light,” or roll through a stop sign. I see it every day (luckily BEFORE they hit my side door). Even though everyone knows, or should know the “rules of the road,” there are some folks who are…
Once there was a laundry room with old, worn-out linoleum floor. It was functional but did not have the look and feel of newer homes. The lady of the house decided to replace the flooring with new ceramic tile. She engaged her husband with the idea, outlining the benefits…
There was a joke I heard many years ago that went like this…
3 workers were hired to run telephone lines. The first part of their job was to install the poles on which the wires would run. Each day, the foreman would ask the workers how many poles…
We recognize that risk is inherent in many aspects of our lives. And most of us will do what is prudent to avoid unreasonable risk in our activities, such that we are left with some level of tolerable risk. It may be safer to stay home and not travel…
Your organization gets information, feedback, and requests from customers all the time. It’s up to you to do some preliminary analysis and determine what the customer really wants. Do they want to buy something? Do they want to complain about something? Do they have a need for which no…
When I first heard this phrase, I was working in an R&D group developing electronic DCS. My first interpretation was that until the Sales Department got an order for a new product, new ideas sort of sat on the shelf with low priority… meaning that people were probably working…
*The “Just Do It” approach was previously referenced in the blog entry Seat-of-your-Pants Software?
If used early in the development lifecycle, a “just do it” approach could help marketing determine the look-and-feel of an application program with a complex user interface. Early software prototyping on a PC…
The “see something, say something” mantra is being used as a countermeasure for terrorism and crime, but it can also be effective to improve functional safety in development teams and plant sites. It could be useful in general process improvement as well.
This can be especially evident during training…
I’ve had software development folks tell me that the “just do it” approach is a valid lifecycle model for SW development. In their context, this means writing the code based on limited marketing and design information and then backfilling the requirements and design specifications to describe what was done. …
Experience is a good teacher. But how do you get the experience?
Formal classroom or online training is often available for more general skills, but on-the-job training usually provides a more in-depth path to gain such experience. After doing a job for a while, working through difficulties with colleagues,…
It doesn’t take much to remember a time you wish you had “looked before you leaped.” The time you bought furniture that would not fit through the doorway, or the small tree you planted whose roots are now cracking through the sidewalk. Don’t you wish you had given more…
What constitutes a good coding guideline?
Serious software development for functional safety requires a coding standard or coding guideline. Most organizations have one, but how do you know if it’s good?
You need to look beyond the boilerplate and physical code layout that are often defined in a coding…
Imagine. Marketing has just approached the engineering department and says your new safety product must have SIL 3 Capable certification instead of SIL 2 to be successful. You are in the engineering group developing this new product. Now what?
Let’s assume that the “change request” makes…
I consistently find that with companies who are new to functional safety development, the SW process is not as structured or mature as the HW process. SW development is often more informal, and subject to the interpretation of one or more SW developers. But when project delays occur, it’s…
This week marks the 10th anniversary of the Texas City Refinery Explosion. Is it any safer to work in the oil refinery industry since then? That’s not an easy question to answer. It’s difficult to get a yardstick out to measure safety. But if we consider the number of…
I often walk through my quiet neighborhood streets on weekday evenings or weekend mornings. These are the times when I don’t expect much traffic, and my expectations are usually met. The probability of a dangerous event that would injure me seems pretty low (risk assessment), since I am usually…