The IoT is irrevocably changing product development. Corporate value propositions and business models are becoming increasingly linked to the connectivity of their products. However, the multi-faceted product and service opportunities offered by the IoT is also presenting enterprises and OEMs with a range of new and augmented development challenges. Organisations are struggling to develop new, quality content fast enough to meet shrinking time-to-market windows.
Over the past ten years, one of the main ways that development organisations have addressed increasing software content creation pressures has been through the use of Agile and iterative development methodologies. Although Agile development has gained the most widespread adoption within the enterprise/IT domain, the desire to realise its benefits is not limited to that sector – it can be successfully extended to areas as specialised as IoT and embedded product engineering.
It’s hard to argue with the fact that the serial, waterfall methods that have been so widely used for so long in embedded are falling short. Over 30% of projects are reported as completed behind schedule. As such, it should be no surprise that more and more embedded engineers have been attempting to replicate the success of IT developers and are adopting Agile methods.
As these organisations attempt to accelerate development and instill faster feedback loops, one of their key challenges to achieving greater IoT corporate agility is through the decoupling of traditionally serial hardware and software development processes. The interdependence of these two engineering domains clearly controls and dictates many actions within the development cycle. Now, however, our research is showing that Agile practitioners are adopting new tools to help them adapt to these new market dynamics and development needs. In particular, more engineering organisations are adopting virtual platform/prototyping solutions (VPS) to accelerate their software development efforts in advance of final silicon availability.
Virtual platform/prototyping solutions, such as those offered by Cadence, Synopsys, and Intel/Wind River among others, will continue to gain adoption in the IoT marketplace as product engineering organisations look for ways to improve their most critical mechanism for differentiation, software development. However, we expect other use cases for this technology will spur even greater adoption in the future – namely, the ability for the simulation platforms to accelerate software testing. As much as the IoT augments software development challenges, it also amplifies the complexity of deployment networks as well as the potential impact of software quality issues. Solutions such as VPS tools that can abstract complexity and allow organisations to accelerate the most critical phases of the product development cycle will be placed at a premium within the new IoT market dynamics.