Re: Best Practices for a Hardware/Embedded Designer

In my experience, designers and engineers our two very different type jobs. In a R&D group of lets say twenty, there will only be one or two designers, maybe three. The rest are just engineers. The designers think up and write the design specification and the engineers will simply engineer to that specification. The fastest way to kill a company is to burden those one or two designers with paper work. In fact, they might simply just leave. In my opinion, documentation should be the responsibility of the engineers and not the designers.

Thomas

Hello, I'm looking for some information that describes some of the best > practices or habits for successful electronic design or embedded > design. I'm trying to convince some co-workers that it is important to > document their work and follow standards in their designs. Some of my > co-workers are very fast designers and are respected by their peers, > but in their rush to get the design done they often ignore standards > and don't document their work, such as in their schematics or in their > FPGA code. I feel these habits and behavior actually wastes money, by > that I mean that if someone has to take their undocumented work, they > won't know what is going on. I realize that I might not be able to > change more senior engineers, but I might be able to leave an > impression on the newer engineers. If anyone knows of some habits or a > list of some best practices that make a successful design, please pass > them onto me. Most of these habits I would assume fall into proper > system engineering. > > thanks, > joe >
Reply to
Thomas Magma
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Didn't you just contradict yourself here? If designers are the one who write the design specification, and documentation should be the responsibility of the engineers, something has to give! In my opinion, designers are quite useless to an organization if they can't communicate their designs effectively and completely (read documentation). It's ok if they think it's crappy work to write a document but if they simply won't write specs/documents, then I'd rather have them leave....they'd be useless with their designs sitting in their heads.

Cheers Bhaskar

Reply to
Bhaskar Thiagarajan

But a well-written design specification _is_ documentation. Where I've been we called such people "systems architects" or "systems engineers", and expected them to write thourough specifications. Asking the systems architect to document someone _else's_ work creates a PITA, of course.

-- and "designers" were usually low-level mechanical engineers who worked up from drafting.

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Tim Wescott
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Reply to
Tim Wescott

Right, it's usually a combination of words like system, design or designer, architect and engineer or engineering. In fact I've seen it change each time the business cards are reprinted. I guess my point was that in my experience, management should try to keep the brains behind their company happy, and the smart ones usually do. This is partially achieved by lessening the paper work burden and allowing more time to do research and to play with new technologies.

Thomas

Reply to
Thomas Magma

The best designers/systems engineers/system architects are usually people who can communicate, their ideas to those who must implement them, effectively. If they cannot do that then life becomes very difficult for everyone in the company.

Whether they like it or loathe it, designers/systems engineers/system architects in a High Integrity Development Environment have to record their assumptions, ideas and calculations and allow others to check it out in properly convened technical review processes. When lives may depend on the outcome of the development it helps to clearly identify where failures were really caused so that future failures of the same type can be eliminated.

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Paul E. Bennett ....................
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Paul E. Bennett

"Paul E. Bennett" wrote in news:d8kpev$h4g$1$ snipped-for-privacy@news.demon.co.uk:

In every one of my companies, we have always enforced design review. No one is immune from the process, no matter how experienced they are. During the design review process, I have found that the majority of criticisms and corrections usually come from the person who is being reviewed. Its amazing how many little mistakes are caught when you have to articulate and defend your own design.

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Al Clark
Danville Signal Processing, Inc.
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Reply to
Al Clark

Design reviews do work and they work even better if everyone prepares and written notes and action items are published.

george

Reply to
GMM50

Hells Bells, that's the biggest load of bollocks I have heard in a long time.

Ian

Reply to
Ian Bell

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