Monthly Archives: June 2011

Releasing Code

Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.

He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Glennan Carnie

The Release process

The Release process defines the actions required to deliver a software product to an external customer. The external customer is any entity outside the development department. This may be a true (paying) customer, or may be another engineering department, for example Testing or Production.

The Release process is a triggered activity. The trigger events are scheduled as part of project planning. Defining a release is a project milestone which must define

What will be released
When it will be released […]

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enum ; past, present and future

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

The enumerated type (enum) is probably one of the simplest and most underused  features of the C and C++ which can make code safer and more readable without compromising performance.

In this posting we shall look at the basic enum from C, how C++ improved on C’s enum, and how C++0X will make them a first class type.

Often I see headers filled with lists of #defines where an enum would be a much better choice. Here is a classic example:

/* adc.h […]

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Change Management

Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.

He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Glennan Carnie

Change Management is concerned with the proposal, selection and scheduling of changes during the lifecycle of a project.

Change Management is interlinked with, but separate to, Revision Control.

Change Management is the core to controlling your development processes. Without effective Change Management the management of your project is subject to slavish adherence to a (fixed, and pre-determined) project plan, with no mechanism for dealing with inevitable changes in requirements, design, implementation or testing.

It is no surprise that Change Management is at the […]

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Baselines and Branching

Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.

He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Glennan Carnie

A baseline is an identified set of files and directories in which there is one and only one version of each file and directory.

A baseline identifies one particular configuration of the software (or a subset thereof)

The baseline represents a fixed point in the development; that may be recreated as required.

Specifying a Baseline

A baseline defines a set of files, each at a particular version. These need not be the latest (most recent) version. A baseline label uniquely identifies the configuration. Files […]

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