"Expert Guide to Program Management for Developing Embedded
Systems", edited by Kim Fowler. Comes out the end of September.
I wrote chapter 8, "The Discipline of System Design".
Off topic for this forum but I'm happy that we're finally
done, and it is astonishing just how much you learn about designing complex high-tech systems from building toy airplanes. If you're going beyond just building a kit and getting into trying to achieve a goal with an airplane you're designing, then you're developing a frame of mind and a skill set that could be used for designing anything from a nifty new smart-phone app to a missile defense system.
The way the chapter took shape was interesting: Kim had wanted me to write a chapter that was mostly about applying control theory to systems with feedback control; instead, that subject kept shrinking until it was just an example and a pointer to a book.
What happened was that I kept circling back to "jeeze, there's going to be wet-behind-the-ears college kids reading this, and I'm writing it like the world is an ideal place!"
So the chapter ended up having a lot of material on solving the real-world problems of extracting comprehensive specifications from non-engineers, how to prototype things for business managers so they know where you're going without thinking you're further along than you are, how to design and partition complex systems from the ground up, when to buy stuff vs. when to build it, ways to organize your project team so that systems design doesn't get neglected until integration time, and stuff like that.
I really liked working with Kim. He probably wrote about 10% of the material in the chapter, and we kind of pushed each other into writing something that was much better than I would have done had someone just given me the chapter title and said "go!"
http://www.amazon.com/Developing-Managing-Embedded-Systems-Products/dp/0124058795/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1407182553&sr=1-1&keywords=Developing+and+Managing+Embedded+Systems+and+Products
Topic: Totally off topic -- new book (Read 647 times)