Whether your customers are triple-play carriers, government agencies, or consumers, they want the latest technology, the most features, and the best performance. This makes embedded device software astoundingly complex. When you're responsible for uptime, you face big challenges and bigger risks. The equipment you sell today may well be in use 10 years from now and still require support. Software shipped with undetected faults can break your company.
Wind River Device Management is Wind River's response to our customers' requests to "solve" the diagnostics dilemma. Our Device Management products give original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) a common toolset and infrastructure to link development, test, and field support teams throughout the equipment life cycle. And they help forge a strong, proactive technology bond between our customers and their customers.
The first benefit of Device Management is dramatically faster resolution of defects – during development, system integration, software verification, and product validation, and in the field. The second benefit is improved use of human resources – a streamlined diagnostics process. The third is the aggregation of a product-specific knowledge base that archives the intelligence and experience of your engineering teams over time. The fourth is improved customer satisfaction. This is a powerful off-the-shelf solution.
No matter what your sphere of responsibility, Wind River Device Management can help make your work life more productive and your company more profitable. Click the button that best describes your role, and learn how our products map to the demands of your job.
Developers
Testers
Support
Business
Workflow
Developers
The Challenges
Embedded application developers are starved for time. Because they are the company experts on the code they write, development engineers are often asked to change roles at least twice in the device life cycle – to participate in system integration and verification, and again when problems arise in deployed products. These tasks are time-consuming, drawing an organization's most skilled personnel away from their highest return on investment (ROI) activities. Trying to diagnose intermittent software problems from symptoms is slow and imprecise. This reallocation of human resources to quality assurance (QA) and support functions puts development schedules at risk. Developers and test and support teams often use different, incompatible toolsets and work in different parts of the world.
Device Management
Engineers can use Sensorpoints to dynamically instrument running functions to gain insight into their operations. With Sensorpoints, developers create test harnesses to make sure their code is rigorously and thoroughly exercised during QA — up to 70% more than is common with existing test methods.
Core files and Sensorpoints enable developers to diagnose and correct software faults encountered during testing based on real time-of-failure data, not vague symptoms. Device Management provides a workflow, information storage, and knowledge share infrastructure that allow teams to use the same tools and the same data to address problems no matter where in the world they are.
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Wind River Lab Diagnostics Product Note
Testers
The Challenges
Today's embedded developers and test engineers face a chronic time squeeze. The individual applications and integrated systems they are tasked with testing are enormously complex, and the test suites available to them are often incomplete or out of date. A project is often behind schedule by the time it reaches the QA lab. Modifying the application for testing purposes requires recompiling, rebooting, or reflashing the target, all of which requires testers to hurry up and wait, sometimes for several hours. Not only does this introduce uncertainty, it requires additional rebuild cycles before the product can be released. Geographically distributed test teams often experience delays, duplicating effort or working from different data. Traditionally, intermittent problems have to be replicated before they can be diagnosed, an imprecise process that further slows the test process. Finally, testers often lack the tools to address faults that occur during black-box test. Few OEMs have the tools or bandwidth to test their products in the many different ways they may ultimately be configured in the field. Many customers tell us they currently exercise about 30% of their code before shipping their products.
Device Management
With Lab Diagnostics, test engineers can download application-specific test harnesses, or grouped Sensorpoint sequences, from a central repository. Support for scripting makes it possible to automate complex test sequences, for 24/7 productivity in the QA lab. Site managers deploy Sensorpoints to running devices under test and collect core files, performance, and time-of-failure data from devices. This data is archived on the Device Management Server, where distributed test teams, developers, and even engineers working on subsequent product iterations can access it. Fixes can be incorporated in Sensorpoints, downloaded to devices, and tested on running software. Sensorpoints written by the application developer give test teams deeper insight into the application in the test lab and require less personal product knowledge to be highly effective. Testing running software with Sensorpoints does not require recompiling, rebooting, or reflashing the target, and has virtually no impact on system performance. Customers predict a 30% to 50% increase in tester productivity and 50% to 70% better code coverage with Lab Diagnostics.
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Lab Diagnostics Product Note
Support
The Challenges
No matter how well a device is tested before it ships, it's hard to simulate field conditions in the lab. Instability, performance degradation, intermittent failures – any or all of these will probably happen sometime between product release and end of life. The usual ways of supporting deployed devices – call centers, dispatched technicians, the process of trying to replicate failure conditions – are slow, often inconclusive, and always costly. Today, the hardest cases often get referred back to development for diagnosis and resolution, undermining a company's ability to deliver new products on time. Field engineers too often have more responsibility than resources and too little intimate knowledge of the software they're expected to support, while customers are understandably anxious to have their issues resolved.
Device Management
With Device Management, applications are designed for supportability. Sensorpoints written alongside the code can be "turned on" in the field to remotely diagnose faults and collect real-time data from deployed products. Call center personnel can identify and correct a wider range of problems with Sensorpoints. When issues require escalation, support engineers can access data from running software, perform fact-based analysis, test fixes, and patch running applications in the field. Once support and/or maintenance is complete, support engineers disable the Sensorpoints they've used to instrument the system. This minimizes impact on system performance and ensures device security. Information aggregated from deployed devices becomes a real-world knowledge base, accessible by field and test engineers, as well as teams charged with developing next-generation products. Access to model and configuration-specific Sensorpoints and associated fixes empowers support engineers to diagnose and resolve more and more complicated software issues, in shorter time.
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Field Diagnostics Product Note
Business
The Challenges
The customer wants performance, features, uptime. The executive team wants the same things – faster, cheaper, better – in order to drive business, optimize margins, win new customers, and hold on to the customers they already have. What gets in the way of realizing these goals? Resource constraints. Redundant effort. Complexity. When development cycles stretch into time allocated for test, product quality suffers. Products that ship with only 30% of the code exercised are accidents waiting to happen. Support is too often an expensive afterthought, with at least 10% of calls resolved only after an engineer has gone onsite to collect data and an engineer or two back at headquarters have invested hours or days replicating a problem before it can be solved. Increasingly, the ability to update and upgrade deployed software differentiates OEMs, but the engineering effort to put remote monitoring and maintenance systems in place is beyond any but the largest, richest companies.
Device Management
Our Device Management solution links development, QA, and support teams across the whole product life cycle. It provides a common infrastructure and toolset for debugging single applications, testing integrated systems, and supporting products in the field. Combining unique diagnostics technology with a secure, distributed information management system, Device Management not only leverages the expertise of your development team at every phase of the device life cycle, it enables your company to build a knowledge library that increases in value over time, even after the engineers who designed your product have moved on. Device Management products snap into your existing IDE and complement the diagnostics and support solutions you already have in place. Created by an industry-leading vendor, Device Management products are not only fully supported but also guaranteed to evolve in response to changing market needs. To estimate the impact on your company's productivity and bottom line, invite your engineering management to put their numbers in our ROI calculator.
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Device Management Product Overview
Device Management Workflow
Wind River Device Management provides innovative technology and a robust infrastructure to streamline the diagnosis and repair of running software—during development, in the test lab, and after your product is deployed. Click the diagram to learn how Device Management empowers cross-functional collaboration for knowledge sharing and the speedy resolution of defects in running systems.
