Hi James, Sorry it took so long to take on this, but it was busy
week.

I have to make clear that embUnit is not my work, it is created by
gentleman called Yusuke Sasaki.

In the company of our size, I think I have seen every form of
organizational crab there is! However the strategy of our company is
to grow via acquisitions. This means that I have seen from the same
chair the growth from carage band to global market leader. I have
liked every minute of it, but continuous acquisitions lead into
continuous organization reshape, which leads into political issues,
which leads into difficulties in portfolio management, prioritazing,
etc. I think everyone can see how all this affects also every micro
aspect of development. Global mass market on top of this type of
atmospehere also makes finding the responsible client/customer/owner
(representative) demanding. Even though our agile experimentation
has not been able to affect the structures outside our department,
we still often success in iterative planning and this makes us
believe that iterative development is the only way to go rationally.
In my own opinion development has allways been iterative, but we are
now just making it more disciplined and visible by having a common
language (agile) and this paradoxally gets us in trouble some times.
If anything, we may have been able to get people to understand a bit
more that it is needed to experiment, and kill the bad ideas early.
It is better to focus on actual design and then documents, rather
than otherway around. Experimenting is much, much, cheaper and
faster today than it was say 10 years ago.

All new code developed in our Finland site is C. We still have some
assembler in production. Going "forward" from C is still quite far,
I believe. Across the organization of course all flavors of software
is developed.

Timo


--- In AgileEmbedded@yahoogroups.com, James Grenning <grenning@...>
wrote:
>
> Hello Timo
>
> I just took a quick look at your site. I need to read your
papers
> and look over embUnit. It looks like you have done a lot of good
work.
>
> What are some of the issues your organization is running into?
>
> Are all your embedded systems written in C?
>
> James
>
> On Nov 4, 2006, at 11:10 AM, tpunkka wrote:
>
> > Thank you James for welcoming me.
> >
> > Trying to keep long story short. I have been professionaly
developing
> > embedded systems for 12 years. I got my masters in EE from
Helsinki
> > University of Tech. in 1998, but towards the new millenium I
> > gradually shifted my focus more and more to embedded SW instead
of
> > electronics. So I'm pretty much your average embedded firmware
> > developer. Somewhere around 2000 I felt that stuff is getting
> > quite complex, and it is time to raise my super-programmer head
and
> > look out for something new. Until that it had been all ad hoc
assy
> > for 1-2kB apps. I quickly found out about lightweight, or agile,
> > methods and got hooked. I signed for post graduate studies in
2003,
> > but this time it is not EE, but software engineering and work
> > psychology. Go figure.
> >
> > We have been doing agile-ish, Scrum-ish, embedded system
development
> > since 2003 and made a pilot with cross-disciplined team (ele,
pcb,
> > mech and sw) in 2004-2005. Currently the embedded SW team is
still
> > going strongly towards agility with Scrum and some of the so
called
> > agile practices, like pair programming and TDD. We have also been
> > able to infect some other development departments.
> >
> > The setting for our agile intervention is a global large
> > organization (~100 000 employers). So we know an administrative
and
> > heavy bureaucracy org when we see one.
> >
> > Challenging environment for rapid dev with any method one might
say.
> > You can find some thoughts and papers from the journey at:
> >
> > http://ng-embedded.blogspot.com/
> >
> > Hope to see some energy in this group. It took a while for me to
> > find it!
> >
> > Anyone attending the Agile Business Conference in London next
week?
> >
> >
> >
>
> --------
> James W. Grenning
> Object Mentor, Inc.
> cell: 847-331-9942
> www.objectmentor.com
> blog.objectmentor.com
> --------
>
>
>
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>