Sehmi-Conscious Thoughts : Embedded Systems

TechEd EMEA 2008 Developers - Introducing the Windows Embedded track

asehmi — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:46:52 GMT

Catherine Heller, Technical Evangelist on my team, has been working hard to put together a great Windows Embedded track at TechEd EMEA 2008: Developers in Barcelona, Spain | 10-14 November, 2008. She's provided a comprehensive write up of the track on her Blog - "We believe there's a huge opportunity for developers in this space, especially as solutions begin to span devices, the PC, and the Web."

I'm presenting at TechEd too, in the Architecture track. My session is:

ARC313: Decentralized Software Services in Action: Architecting Integration and Grid Patterns using the CCR & DSS Toolkit 2008

This talk will provide a brief introduction to the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR), Decentralized Software Services (DSS), and Visual Programming Language (VPL). They ship as part of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio and the newly announced CCR and DSS Toolkit 2008. These .NET technologies are being used in non-robotics applications ranging from business processes, major web sites, retail automation, command and control systems, scientific computing, sensor-nets and much more. At the core of CCR/DSS lies a powerful concurrent messaging engine plus a REST-like protocol. This enables users to easily build applications that require coordination of messages between loosely-coupled service-oriented components within and across distributed nodes of the application spanning embedded and traditional client/server systems. To explore the applicability of these technologies to distributed systems computing we describe a couple of simple frameworks. The first shows how enterprise integration patterns can be built on DSS and composed with VPL. And the second is a system to host and dynamically deploy autonomous connected DSS services. Both can run across the full range of Windows embedded, server and client operating systems.

Day 5, Friday, November 14, 15:15 - 16:30, Room 117

Hope to see you there!

Architecture Journal #17 - Article on Distributed Embedded Systems

asehmi — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 12:21:01 GMT

I've been working on Distributed Embedded Systems and related communications technology recently so for the "Distributed Computing", Issue #17, of the Microsoft Architecture Journal I wrote a paper on the subject. My Aim was to open up - 'expose' - this very exciting field to the "traditional" distributed systems community. As the industry moves from standalone, smart devices to connected devices and then towards systems of service-oriented connected devices, we will begin to see much more overlap with "traditional" distributed systems design and architecture practices. Not everything we (traditional distributed systems developers and architects) know translates easily to the world of distributed embedded systems, so it's vitally important to understand the different challenges and issues faced, technical imperatives, development strategies, and technology road maps. Hopefully, in my paper, I've done some justice towards answering those questions.

Apart from my own paper there's a fab collections of others. I haven't started reading them as yet, but personally know and respect many of the authors. I know attendees of PDC2008 will be receiving a copy of the Journal, so we've been calling this the "PDC Issue"! The new editorial team are beginning to make their positive marks and you'll notice a new clean, bold look to the Journal as it starts to establish a shared identity with Microsoft other "architecture evangelism" assets. I approve wholeheartedly, but it still hasn't got the minimalism I think we prefer in Europe Western/Northern. But at the end of day it's about content value and that you certainly have in abundance.

http://www.msarchitecturejournal.com/pdf/Journal17.pdf

On another note, my colleague, Yuriy Zaytsev, alerted me to a Japan MITI survey which concluded:

(4) Over 40% of the quality problems with embedded products after shipment are caused by software errors.
The leading cause of the quality problems with embedded products after shipment was software errors (46.3%), followed by hardware design faults (21.8%) and production faults (12.7%). A trend over the past four years is that the percentage of faults during product conceptualization and specification continues to fall year after year. Software errors have remained the major cause of quality problems for the past four years.
(6) Advanced* embedded software engineers are needed.
Although overall shortages are easing, demand is still high for embedded software engineers with advanced skills; the shortage rate of entry-level engineers was 26.3%, while that of advanced (experienced) engineers was 48.4%. Over the three years from 2006, the shortage rate of entry-level engineers fell from 44.2% to 26.3%, showing the largest decline among all the categories. The shortage rate of advanced engineers stood out last year at 64.9%, but the rate declined this year, making the disparity between different skill levels restored to an extent equivalent to that of two years ago.

*Advanced: Capable of implementing technologies, methodologies and businesses while exercising leadership or capable of implementing these while leading internal and external teams by means of standardization and the development of new technologies.
Intermediate: Capable of discovering and solving challenges in business operations while exercising leadership.
Entry-level: Capable of discovering and solving challenges in business operations under the leadership of higher-level engineers.
(7) Software engineering methods have been introduced for improving quality and developing human resources.
The respondents’ most common reason for having adopted solutions developed and provided by the Software Engineering Center was “quality improvement” (cited by more than 75%), followed by “human resource development” (more than 60%). This suggests that many respondents recognize SEC’s solutions as effective for solving major challenges in developing embedded software. About 70% of those who have adopted SEC’s solutions give high marks to them, rating them as being “beyond expectations” or “just as expected.”

The questions that arise for me, especially in the context of realizing Distributed Embedded Systems solutions (i.e. Complex Embedded Systems), are:

Which, if any, of the software development processes, design and architecture methods we use in traditional software development, can be leveraged in Embedded Systems development to mitigate these quality problems and skills shortages?
What is Microsoft doing to address these issues in terms of next generation tool chains for this industry?

Over the next few months we'll certainly be exploring these questions in more detail and report back our learning.

Anyway, here’s wishing you a great read of Journal 17!

JAOO 2008 Presentation

asehmi — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:46:19 GMT

In a previous post I listed all the Microsoft folks presenting at JAOO 2008. Well that event has successfully come and gone this week and I'm pleased to share my presentation with the community.

My talk went pretty well and I achieved my objective to explain the relevance of Distributed Embedded Systems to traditional distributed systems developers and architects. I briefly discussed the Device Profile for Web Services and CCR/DSS as good candidates for DES communications infrastructure, choosing to describe these technologies mainly because they would be relevant to my audience in non-DES scenarios too.

The back end of my talk hints at Fabriq4Dss - an implementation of Fabriq (remember that?) on CCR/DSS. I skipped the demos of Fabriq4Dss because I only had 45 minutes for the session, but rest-assured you'll be hearing more about this here soon.

Other highlights of the conference were meeting, Gregor Hohpe and Jeff Sutherland. Gregor attended my session after which I demoed another recent CCR/DSS/VPL project of mine ("PIE") related to his famous book on Enterprise Integration Patterns. We're plotting something together which I hope can be pulled off.

I sat next to Jeff Sutherland at the speaker's dinner. He is of course the co-creator of Scrum and as we chatted he intrigued me with a number of non-S/W development uses of the process. Having myself, just prior to JAOO, attended at a team offsite exploring elements of virtual teaming and organizational design with Dr Homa Bahrami, I thought this conversation with Jeff was sweet serendipity - which in turn reminded me of the late Roger Needham's words, "Serendipity is looking for a needle in a haystack and finding the farmer's daughter." How-so-very-true!

JAOO was a great conference and I'd like to extend my thanks to Beat Schwegler, Microsoft Denmark and the JAOO organizing committee for having me.

P.S. We'll be talking a lot more about these topics at Tech-Ed EMEA Developers 2008, 10-14 November (select Embedded Systems, Architecture tracks).