Whitepapers
White Papers from Foliage are your source for information on the latest technology developments that affect your industry. This page lists all the white papers Foliage has published over the past several years. You may also browse by industry, or go directly to our technology-focused papers.
Author: Charlie Alfred; Jesse Ambrosina; Tom Mariano
Featuring systems engineering as a central discipline is a major step in improving effectiveness in product development. Effectively applying a systems-view to business and technology challenges enables the development of medical devices that more effectively meet the clinical and market demand, have the built-in flexibility to adapt to changing market conditions, and have smooth integration paths that lead to product development efforts that are on schedule, within budget, and without latent defects. An absent or incapacitated systems engineering role can lead to a series of product development problems that manifest as poor performance, late products, or products incapable of scaling - especially when product complexity and specialization increase.
Author: Charlie Alfred; Jesse Ambrosina; Tom Mariano
As the sponsor for the development of a new product or system development have you ever been confronted by one of the following situations? o Have you wondered if the people who designed the system ever bothered to ask users to try the product before launching it into production? o Have you found during a major design review that the developers assumed a requirement was so obvious it did not have to be documented? o Have you ever found a design team designing circuits, coding software, and detailing mechanical parts before anyone understood the success criteria for the system? o Have you ever thought you were ramping production yet week after week there are new “technical discoveries”? This is the domain of System Engineering or in the case of the scenarios above, the lack there of. Engineers enter the workforce and learn system analysis and design methods from the bottom up over the period of 10 to 30 years. Many spend their entire careers with only limited exposure to the users of their designs. As their career advances they are assigned increasingly organizational and business focused responsibilities. They find themselves confronted with learning how to manage the efforts of engineering disciplines beyond their fields. In effect they learn from the bottom up over years of trial and error otherwise referred to as experience. Effectively applying a systems-view to business and technology enables the delivery of a product or system without latent defects, on schedule and within budget. Without this view, it can be difficult to consistently make a profit on the products under development.
Author: Dan O'Connor - Software Architect
For medical devices and medical information systems, there is real pressure to get new products and product upgrades out faster to better respond to customer needs and market trends. There are additional factors such as interoperability certification and support for meaningful use that have caused many device and information system companies to consider short term changes to their products to comply with these directives. As you alter your product roadmap to accommodate these changes, make sure you understand the decisions that are being made. This is the best time to take stock of your development readiness and understand just how well your current software assets will support your revised product roadmap. Finding out too late about debilitating “technical debt” can derail product development programs now and in the future, resulting in costly missed market opportunities. This paper provides a quick introduction to the technical debt metaphor as it applies to best practices in software development. These concepts are then applied to the particular complexities in the development of medical software. We describe where short-term technical debt can be a useful tool and how excessive, unattended debt can hinder quality in the field and cripple development velocity (resulting in significant time to market and customer satisfaction problems). Specific guidelines are provided on how to assess your current applications for technical debt as you begin planning a technical approach to support your product roadmap.
Author: Tim Bosch, Chief Architect
Once the ARRA came out last year, virtually all health information technology (HIT) companies disrupted their planned initiatives in a scramble to realize the promised financial incentives for their customers and for themselves (through upgrades and new sales). Now that the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT) has released the preliminary definition of meaningful use and an interim final rule (IFR) regarding an initial set of standards, implementation specifications, and certification criteria, HIT companies have finalized their plans and are rushing forward to wrap up their efforts so that they are ready by 2011.
Author: Dan O’Connor, Software Architect
During the economic downturn the semiconductor equipment market has significantly retracted. Equipment suppliers were forced into survival mode in many cases. As the semiconductor market begins to recover and customers begin to order new products in higher volumes, product competitiveness and time to market will be absolutely critical. This is a good time to take stock of your development readiness and to understanding how well legacy software assets will support the product roadmap. Finding out too late about debilitating “technical debt” can derail product development programs resulting in costly missed market opportunities. This paper provides a quick introduction to the technical debt metaphor as it applies to best practices in software development. These concepts are then applied to the particular complexities in developing semiconductor equipment control systems. We describe where short-term technical debt can be a useful tool and how excessive, unattended debt can hinder quality in the field and cripple development velocity (resulting in significant time to market and customer satisfaction problems). Specific guidelines are provided on how to assess your legacy equipment control software for technical debt as you prepare to participate in the long-awaited upturn.
A well designed software architecture is key to efficiently building, maintaining, and interconnecting your software. Foliage’s assessment process is based on working with clients in over 300 products across many domains. Our highly collaborative and accelerated approach is a thorough, objective evaluation of how well a product’s software architecture meets your current or anticipated product needs. It also evaluates technical documentation and product source code for a 360º view into technology, development process maturity and IP asset leveragability.
Author: Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Director
Unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) have been around since World War I, but only relatively recently is the UAS marketplace beginning to grow by leaps and bounds. To benefit from the extensive UAS capabilities and to provide a much needed economic boost to the Aviation Industry, the FAA must drive an incremental, stratified approach to the update of their regulations and infrastructure. Legislation is before the US Senate to fund the FAA to support the integration of UASs into the national airspace system (NAS) by September 30, 2013.
Author: Mark Hersey Daniel O'Connor
Although the concept of forming a product line may be new to you, many before have faced the dual challenges of making strategic progress towards a more efficient software development model while still meeting the urgent needs of existing development plans. This paper offers some of the industry experience that Foliage has gained in helping clients make a successful transition from a “product-centric” approach to a “product-line based” approach to software development, and focuses specifically on the most important issues that inevitably arise when beginning to form a product line by adopting an incremental migration approach.
Author: Tim Bosch
A typical approach to interoperability is to define a proprietary, customized interface specification, or to use of a standard like HL7 with an agreement between individual parties regarding fields used and how data was represented. As vendor of an enterprise system or a manufacturer of a medical device, you’re likely very familiar with this approach. In fact, providing custom interoperability solutions may have represented a revenue source through your service and support offerings.
Author: Tim Bosch
Providing software product development services to the medical industry for over 17 years, Foliage has witnessed first-hand the triumphs and challenges that are involved in getting new products to market, on time and on budget. Our role in providing services that range from process and technology consulting to custom software product development gives us a unique vantage point on the front lines of many of today’s leading product development initiatives.
Author: Wayne Lobb Karl Aeder
Solar cell and solar panel manufacturers are in a highly competitive worldwide race to attain grid parity for the cost of solar generated electricity. The cost of cell/panel manufacturing is one factor in the total cost of generation. A small fraction of manufacturing costs come from equipment control software and automation software. But this software can have a profound effect – for better or for worse – on the calendar time it takes a solar manufacturing line to evolve from research to reliable high-volume production. In Foliage’s experience, designing and implementing software from the start for simulation and automated testing – software design-for-test – can save months of calendar time, by consistently enabling fast delivery of problem-free changes and enhancements to the floor. This paper discusses several cost-effective software design-for-test techniques: methodical use of programming interfaces for simulation; strict isolation of test code from production code; deterministic functional testing of event-driven control; structured logging that supports efficient event reconstruction for diagnostics; and judicious use of semiconductor manufacturing software-interface standards in solar manufacturing.
Author: Dan O'Connor - Technical Director
This paper examines how the era of profitless prosperity in the semiconductor industry will impact the equipment companies and require them to do more with less. It also highlights a few remaining areas of the R&D process that can be exploited for further efficiencies.
Author: Amit Shah, Test Engineering Manager - Foliage; Tim Bosch, Chief Architect - Foliage
This whitepaper discusses the key steps for implementing an effective automated software testing program for industrial equipment software that will minimize risk, significantly increase the likelihood of success, and demonstrate a return on investment.
Author: Amit Shah, Test Engineering Manager, Foliage Tim Bosch, Chief Architect, Foliage
Manual testing is time-consuming and error prone, with functional and system testing that starts late in the software development lifecycle. A reliance on manual testing significantly increases the risk of late defect discovery and can often lead to product release delays. The lack of test automation can impact manufacturing and support, causing delays and extra effort in these areas as well.
While there are proven automated test tools and techniques for unit and integration testing, most medical device companies have yet to embrace an overall automated testing strategy that fully develops automation capabilities for the full range of testing required for embedded real-time medical devices. This article examines the challenges associated with testing embedded real-time medical systems and presents strategies that address these challenges through automation that will improve quality and reduce verification cycle time and costs.
Author: Dan O’Connor, Technical Director Vince Dovydaitis, Technical Director
Security vendors are feeling the pressure to deliver integrated enterprise security solutions to their customer base. Driving this trend are the end customers, who are looking for improved, integrated threat response coupled with lower total cost of ownership. Suppliers that offer only stove-piped point solutions will lose market share and will eventually be left behind. This paper prescribes a proven approach with well-defined steps for developing a security integration strategy that is aligned with your specific business drivers and delivers early business value.
Author: Amit Shah, Test Engineering Manager and Tim Bosch, Chief Architect
Implementing an automated software testing program requires a structured and planned approach. It requires an automated test strategy specifically tailored to your software development process and regulatory requirements. It also requires that you select the right automated test tools and that you design modularity into your test architecture using automated test frameworks. By following the approach presented in this paper, you can realize a significant return on investment for automated software testing, gain a competitive advantage in the industry by reducing time to market, and increase the quality level for your products.
Author: Tim Bosch - Chief Architect, Medical Division
Commercial software development best practices have embraced agile software development methods for some time now and have clearly demonstrated how they improve pace and efficiency and provide greater flexibility. This paper shows how it is possible to adapt these approaches to medical device software development, and still manage the quality and design controls demanded by various regulatory bodies like the FDA.
Author: Tim Bosch, Chief Architect
This article describes how healthcare information system providers can increase the efficiency and pace of software development by adopting or adapting agile development methods while preserving quality and meeting design control demands.
Author: Charlie Alfred, Principal Architect
The June 2007 issue of 'Product Design & Development' featured an article entitled "A Development Cure: Value Models Can Help Align Medical Product Development Strategy" authored by Charlie Alfred, Principal Architect at Foliage. The article examines how value models can be used to capture the critical business, marketing, competitive, financial and technology information to successfully drive product design and development.
Author: Charlie Alfred, Principal Architect; Tim Bowe, Co-CEO; Dan O’Connor, Chief Architect
Product management for semiconductor equipment can be challenging. Customers, competitors, suppliers, and distributors take actions that can leave you off balance, and challenge you to respond in a decisive and creative way. And when you are not fighting fires with the outside world, your own organization seems to be working at cross-purposes. This paper is about identifying the keys to defining a product strategy destined to succeed.
Value Driven Analysis (VDA) is a Foliage–developed process for ensuring alignment between overarching business and product strategies and the engineering team’s tradeoff decisions. It facilitates synergy between each of the stakeholder groups resulting in a concise, easy to understand product strategy. This in turn helps ensure that product development investments yield optimal return.
Author: Timothy Bowe, Co-CEO
Security equipment manufactures are increasingly being pressured to supply technically complex, integrated systems in response to the industry’s rapid consolidation. Organizations seeking to fulfill an integrated position in the market are more and more utilizing merger and acquisition strategies to achieve increased capabilities and product line expansion. But how do organizations quickly and successfully integrate multiple entities resulting from technology-based acquisitions? This paper investigates the acquisition integration puzzle from the perspective of R&D. “R&D Efficiency in a Chaotic Security Industry” examines the factors and processes that support aligning of business and technology strategies to extract the most market leverage and top-line growth from combined or restructured product lines.
Author: Ron Rubbico, Co-CEO Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Manager Naresh Parmar, Technical Director
As telecommunications companies and service providers struggle to successfully deliver and deploy communications products and services demanded by a rapidly consolidating industry, companies are turning to mergers, acquisitions and reorganizations to realign product strategies as a means to developing more integrated solutions. This paper introduces proven strategies and techniques that drive critical product and business strategies to extract the most market leverage and revenue growth resulting from combined or restructured product lines.
Author: Charlie Alfred, Principal Architect; Tim Bowe, Co-CEO
Successfully delivering next generation products to market is not an easy task. You have to balance requests for new product features against available budget, staffing limitations, schedule constraints, strategic importance and expected profit. The most effective way to address this challenge is by having a well defined (and agreed upon) product strategy. This white paper identifies the keys to defining a product strategy destined to succeed. It outlines some tough questions that your organization must ask prior to establishing an effective product strategy, and it also proposes actions that must be taken if your organization is unable to answer any of these questions.
Author: Tim Bowe, CEO
As the trend towards private equity investment continues to rise, driving up enterprise valuations, increased emphasis is being placed on financial and operational analyses, and market validation, as qualifying components to making final investment decisions. In the technology marketplace, going beyond conventional due diligence to evaluate a company’s product portfolio for alignment of technology and product, to business and product strategies, can make the difference between investment success and failure. This paper directly addresses the issue of evaluation of technical products and their development organization. Using several case studies, the limitations of classical due diligence are drawn, along with the benefits that accrue from a formal product or product portfolio assessment.
Author: Alan Aghan, Principal Engineer
In the foreseeable future there will be an increasing shortage of technically skilled and experienced workers in the Aerospace industry, and the situation is reaching crisis level. This paper discusses this assertion, its causes, its implications and some possible ways to address the problem.
Author: Jim Roman, Senior Business Development Manager, Security; Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Manager, Aerospace, Defense and Security
As terrorists, rogue nations and criminals become more sophisticated, customers in the security market demand rapid response from security manufacturers in building next-generation equipment. Driven by constantly shifting specifications, affordability considerations, and shortened development schedules, trade-off decisions may unknowingly jeopardize market acceptance and in turn, hinder a company’s ability to achieve sustainable market share. This brief explores the impact of following a market-driven philosophy and describes a method of identifying and propagating key value drivers throughout the development cycle to ensure that critical end user requirements are met.
Author: Hoyt Lougee; Brian Bowe; Vince Dovydaitis; Garrett Thurston
The FAA is considering adopting the commercial-avionics guidance RTCA DO-178B for the certifiability of UAS embedded software. This paper identifies a practical approach to identifying system criticality, which is integral to the process of certifying UAS software. In addition, this paper will consider inherent risks and failures of UAS within a variety of operating environments and will conclude with a concrete proposal for a UAS criticality stratification approach.
Author: Jeff Fried, Communications
Computing and communications are steadily converging, driving strong demand for products that support new network protocols and architectures. This paper presents architectural analysis as a strategic option available to communications equipment providers to meet the challenges demanded by convergence. We also explore best approaches and methodologies for analyzing product extension, migration, acquisition and new product development in the context of convergence.
Author: Tim Bowe, Co-CEO; Norm Delisle, Engineering Vice President; Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Manager
Leading companies in the medical industry have a long history of using mergers and acquisitions as an alternative method of advancing their product offerings. The acquisition strategy has been used as an alternative to already large R&D budgets, and as a bulwark against the increasingly long product development cycles under which many companies function. This paper examines the factors that are critical in aligning business and technology strategies to extract the most market leverage and top-line growth from combined or restructured product lines.
Author: Ron Rubbico, Co-CEO; Tim Bowe, Co-CEO; Norm Delisle, Engineering Vice President; Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Manager
As the semiconductor equipment industry continues to recover and drive a new cycle of innovation, the winners of the battle for market share—the survivors of the continuing consolidation—inevitably will be those who can best leverage their combined technology assets to provide differentiable value to both their customers and shareholders. This paper examines the factors that are critical in aligning business and technology strategies to extract the most market leverage and top-line growth from combined or restructured product lines.
Author: Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Manager, Aerospace, Defense, and Security Division; Jim Roman, Senior Business Development Manager, Security
Have you ever authorized a software project only to wind up with something unexpected upon the program’s completion? Does your software development team ever lose sight of the business goals? Once you turn your engineers loose on a software project do you feel that you're no longer in the loop? In the security marketplace, software development increasingly accounts for product development cost overruns, schedule woes, and corporate credibility problems—ultimately affecting survival. What can you do about it? Our latest brief entitled “It’s Your Fault Too” illustrates the critical importance of executive involvement. Four pages from now, you will understand how you can maintain control of your product development efforts.
Author: Ron Rubbico, Co-CEO; Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Manager, Aerospace Division
This paper examines the factors that are critical to align business and technology strategies to extract the most market leverage and top-line growth from combined or restructured product lines. The paper draws from approaches achieving success in other heavily consolidating industries and applies them to the unique challenges facing Aerospace manufacturers.
Author: Karl Aeder, Principal Software Engineer
Many of today’s embedded device control systems require some amount of deterministic software device control. Real-time deterministic control software poses unique technical challenges. By employing proven software architectural approaches, real-time software development project risks can be reduced significantly. In addition, through these approaches organizations can realize significant reductions in time to market and engineering costs across the initial development, enhancement, and maintenance of the software over its lifetime.
Author: Tim Bosch, Chief Architect, Medical Division
This white paper defines “integration” and “interoperability”, and presents best approaches to each based on real world experience. These practical steps will help you meet expectations and successfully achieve the integration and interoperability that you desire.
Author: Norm Delisle, Vice President of Engineering; David Jacques,Engineering Director; Timothy Bowe, co-CEO
This paper describes techniques for linking and aligning business and product objectives with software architecture formulation and software development activities. In short, ensuring that what gets developed meets market needs and delivers on business objectives.
Author: Timothy Bosch, Technical Director; Timothy Bowe, Co-CEO
This new white paper from Foliage discusses the important assessment steps that any medical company should take before investing in a next generation software product development effort. This paper describes a very low investment, high return method to evaluate your existing software-based product where the end result is guaranteed alignment of your business, product and technology goals.
Author: Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Manager; Garrett Thurston, Sales Manager, Aerospace Division
This white paper shows how the FAA-adopted software guidance for manned-applications—RTCA/DO-178B, Software Considerations in Airborne Systems and Equipment Certification; and RTCA/DO-278, Guidelines for Communication, Navigation, Surveillance, and Air Traffic Management (CNS/ATM) Systems Software Integrity Assurance—can be applied to UAV certification.
Author: Norm Delisle, Engineering Vice President
This paper explores how to recognize and recover from fragile legacy equipment software systems. We describe methods for determining whether you are sitting on a legacy software time bomb before your business is impacted.
Author: Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Manager, Aerospace Division; Norm Delisle, Engineering Vice President
This paper presents proven approaches for establishing and aligning effective Business, Product, and Technology strategies that enable an organization to ensure that downstream tradeoffs are made in the context of business goals and objectives.
Author: George Iglesias, Principal Software Engineer; Tim Bosch, Technical Director; Timothy Bowe, Co-CEO
All too often, the ‘sellability’ features of a product get stripped away during the product development stages of requirements and architecture development. Trade-offs are made that may improve configurability and functionability, or shorten schedules, but unwittingly at the cost of usability. This Foliage white paper describes the methods and importance to preserving the intent of meeting your end user needs.
Author: Norm Delisle, Engineering V.P.; David Jacques, Engineer; Tim Bowe, Co-CEO
This paper presents proven approaches for improving product strategy definition and technical strategy alignment for capital equipment product software.
Author: Hoyt Lougee, Engineering Manager, Aerospace Division
This paper offers an analysis of requirements and their tremendous impact on the cost, duration, and predictability of the critical software development task. It also presents common pitfalls and best practices for writing successful requirements that lead to lower costs, shortened schedules, enhanced predictability, and—ultimately—marketplace success.
