exida explains Blog

1. Name your files to make auditing easier; a filename with cryptic job numbers and abbreviations that are used within the company may not be easily understood or cataloged by an auditor

2. Give the auditor the ‘secret decoder ring’ for cryptic company acronyms and abbreviations

3. Have clear…

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Can we really ship a bug-free product? That’s a tough question to answer.  Bugs originate in many places and not all bugs are the same severity.  But you can’t control what you don’t measure.  If you log and classify defects, and control the way changes are made, there may…

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We all know when we’re finished with the product development cycle; it’s printed in a little box on the project schedule Gantt chart.  The end of July… right there on the schedule, and it’s been there since the project inception.  So what happens when you reach 31-July and your…

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Olympic athletes don’t wake up one day and decide to compete in the Olympics.  They don’t arrive at the games by chance or coincidence.  Their journey starts long before the games begin. They are often influenced and inspired by watching others or by their own interests.  They may begin…

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Some time ago, I was involved with embedded software projects using microprocessors that had limited memory, speed, and I/O resources.  All embedded programming was in assembly code.  All memory variables were global; it was too hard to keep track of stack variables.  The hardware design assumed that any technical…

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At 7am, my personal robot (I call him ‘Jake’) turns on the bedroom lights to 50% brightness and waits for my body to recognize the onset of morning.  If I take longer than 5 minutes, Jake will begin to play some soft music.  This is usually enough to get…

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There are organizations that are small enough to follow an informal or even undocumented process and still produce a product of sufficient quality to meet market needs.  When these organizations attempt to develop a safety product, they inevitably fall short of meeting the requirements of IEC 61508.  A formalized…

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Functional Safety Assessments (FSA) focus on the relevant functional safety standards that are to be applied to a product in the appropriate industry.  These are standards such as IEC 61511 in the process automation industry, or ISO 26262 in the automotive industry.  And IEC 61508 is like an umbrella…

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Does your safety development process have a split personality?  Do you “talk-the-talk but not walk-the-walk?”  When crunch time comes for project completion, does the mantra “whatever it takes” matter more than following the process?  Does your process peel away at the seams?

Getting buy-in to a rigorous process for…

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Let’s turn our attention to home remodeling projects for a minute… literally cutting corners.

Most people are familiar with trim molding (baseboard and chair rail).  Laying out the trim on long flat surfaces is pretty easy: measure, cut, nail, paint… done.  Ok, sometimes it goes: measure, cut, measure again,…

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Thinking about developing a safety product?  Use these 3 steps as a starting point:

1. Know thyself

Do you have documented development processes that govern how you develop a product from start to finish?  If not, start by writing down what is actually being done.  Interview the people…

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Something was wrong with our washing machine.  The wash cycle was longer than normal.  The problem seemed intermittent at first, but then it became persistent across all wash cycles.  Preliminary investigation revealed the cycle got stuck on spin.  Now, I am normally not allowed to operate the washer with…

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When I was a kid, I liked watching the Jetsons.  I felt certain that by the year 2000 we’d all be enjoying those flying saucers and futuristic homes.  Imagine my disappointment that in 2018 we still drive on 4 wheels… and my home cannot elevate itself above bad weather……

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There is usually a natural order to things. But there are times when the natural order gets disrupted, and this could be for any number of reasons:  we get busy, overloaded with tasks or information, tired, complacent, etc.  But when you think about it, most of the excuses we…

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Protection systems have been around for a long time, going back to having a canary in the mine, and throughout the Industrial Revolution; so they are not a new thing.  Various stakeholders were involved in business enterprises: owners, suppliers, consumers, community members, and workers. Usually the business owners held…

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We have CMMI processes at CL3; does that help us get IEC 61508 certification for SIL 3?

Companies that deliver a product or service do so by following a sequence of processes.  High quality deliverables are a result of high quality processes and continuous improvement in…

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If you’ve written your new product requirements, you probably understand exactly what they mean.  But will the other people on your project team?  You also probably understand that some unwritten requirements must also be met. They’re just common sense and everyone knows what they are. 

What about that new…

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What if the best minds of the world got together to generate the optimum requirements specification for human co-habitation?  And built it into one large decision matrix to run on the best super-computers?

Decisions would be made solely on objective criteria; no mental arbitration, no skipping steps, no checking…

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