There’s a recurring meme on the internet that “20XX is the year of the Linux Desktop”. That may not yet be true of 2024, but we at Prewitt Ridge believe 2024 can be the year of DevOps for Hardware Engineering, and our tool Verve can help Hardware Engineering teams building complex, world-changing technologies implement DevOps and Continuous Integration into their daily workflows to massively increase productivity.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a combination of the words “Development” and “Operations”, and describes a type of workflow that has been nearly universally implemented in the world of Software Development. This workflow emphasizes the use of collaboration, automation, continuous integration (CI), and continuous delivery (CD) to more rapidly deliver a software application.
One of the unique value propositions of DevOps lies within the CI/CD of DevOps, where changes in one line of code may have second-order and third-order effects in downstream (or upstream) parts of your application that may not be caught until a user encounters it as a bug in the application! In the CI/CD workflow, teams build out extensive unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests that are meant to test out the entire functionality of the application. Through this testing, these unforeseen breaking changes can be caught early in the development process, or at least prior to a new release of the software application, ensuring that the team is delivering a higher quality product, more rapidly with fewer bugs experienced by the end-users.
How does DevOps Apply to Hardware Engineering?
DevOps is nearly universally implemented in the software development world, but how does it apply to Hardware Engineering? There are a few key aspects of implementing DevOps in Hardware Engineering that we think will help hardware engineering teams more rapidly build their world-changing technologies.
Breaking Down Team Silos
In hardware engineering organizations, the development of hardware can often evolve into “siloed” organizations where different teams work in isolation and design hardware up to their prescribed interface. Once this design up to the interface is complete and the drawings are signed, these teams will then toss this design over the brick wall to the next team downstream, and refuse to collaborate any further once they’ve met the specifications of their interface.
This is a bit of an exaggeration, but most engineers have likely had an experience akin to this brick-wall collaboration style when working on a project.
Applying a DevOps for Hardware Engineering approach can help teams overcome this experience. DevOps helps break down the silos between teams and encourages early-and-often cross-functional collaboration between design, analysis and manufacturing engineers. Through this cross-functional collaboration, teams can deliver a better-designed, better-tested system in a much shorter period.
Establishing Automation and Continuous Integration
The cross-functional collaboration enables teams to build rapid analysis and testing pipelines that serve as the foundation of their Continuous Integration pipeline.
Continuous Integration can help automate repetitive, time-consuming, and error-prone tasks, like emailing files or requirements back and forth, manually typing new parameters into an analysis script or downloading an updated CAD file and then uploading the file into an analysis toolset, resetting the boundary conditions and re-running the analysis. Through this automation, engineers can reduce the likelihood of making the dreaded “fat-finger error” during manual entry, and more important enables engineers to focus on innovation and problem-solving, rather than repeating time-consuming tasks.
One of the key enablers of DevOps for hardware engineering is establishing linkages between requirements, the designs and analyses they impact, and the verification events they resolve, and using digital engineering capabilities to automate the computation of these results as the system design evolves. Establishing these linkages creates clear traceability from requirements through design, analyses, and verification.
However, automating the analyses and design to re-execute is the true enabler for agility and efficiency in DevOps for hardware engineering. By digitally establishing these linkages and building automations that will automatically re-run these designs and analyses as requirements change, hardware engineering teams can truly establish a Continuous Integration style workflow in their hardware engineering DevOps pipeline.
Embracing Agile Methodologies
Although the Agile Methodology can be a four-letter word to some organizations and has faced its fair share of criticism, it is still important to recognize that Agile is an integral part of the modern DevOps process.
Agile's approach to breaking down large, complex projects into manageable tasks enables hardware teams to adapt and respond effectively to changes. This flexibility is essential in a field where technological advancements and customer needs evolve rapidly. By fostering continuous improvement and collaboration, Agile methodologies contribute significantly to the efficiency and success of hardware projects. In essence, Agile in hardware DevOps is less about speed and more about precision, adaptability, and resilience in the face of constant change.
Make Verve part of your DevOps for Hardware Engineering Strategy in 2024!
So why could 2024 be the year of DevOps for Hardware Engineering? We’re glad you asked! The team at Prewitt Ridge has been hard at work building Continuous Integration capabilities into our product, with early versions supported by our work with AFRL and other current customers. We’re previewing this capability today, and preparing the official launch of our DevOps capabilities later this year.
To learn more about our product and how it can help your team implement your Hardware Engineering DevOps strategy in 2024, sign up here.
To view a demo of our product, book a 20-minute demo here.