1. Reading
Please read these short essays by Jack Ganssle:
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2006 — Total Recall — Jack Ganssle
(before the first fatal Toyota U.A. crash in 2007) -
2014 — Toyota’s Expensive Software
I am not suggesting that Shuttle development practices should be anyone’s goal. Perhaps a better benchmark is avionics. It’s largely believed that no one has been killed by defective firmware in commercial aircraft, yet that code controls pretty much everything. Sure, the pilots can take over, but modern planes are fly-by-wire.
2014
| The first Boeing 737 MAX crash (Lion Air Flight 610) was on October 29, 2018. |
2. Responses
Create a Google Doc or Word document to hold your responses to the following prompts. Submit your writing to Blackboard.
2.1. Response 1
Near the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was much talk about ventillators, medical devices which take over the process of breathing for a patient that is sedated and not able to breathe on their own. In response, Medtronic released design files and information about their Puritan Bennett 560 (PB560) ventillator model.
You can find some of the ZIP files at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1yPCZO3L-kPeykSCQGBeMw6bMt6skt4pf?usp=sharing
Suppose you were part of a team that intended to reproduce this design.
Due to global supply chain issues and also the simple fact that the PB560 is a relatively old product, you need to redesign parts of the system to use a different processor.
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How do you consider issues of public health and safety in the context of this redesign?
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Describe the trade-offs that you must balance in order to produce a working prototype in a short enough time to be useful, but understanding that errors (like in the software) can have direct safety of life impact.
2.2. Response 2
You are an embedded systems engineer at either Toyota or Boeing in the years before the news about the respective events.
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Describe a (fictional) "day in the life of an engineer" that may have happened at either Toyota or Boeing.
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Where are decision points where there would have been an opportunity to have affected the trajectory of the events?
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How can an embedded engineer personally change their development practices to help in producing firmware the has fewer bugs than the average developer?