System architecture answers the difficult questions with big impact early in product development. Which SoM comes with a CRA-compliant Linux? Which components should manufacturers develop themselves, which outsource and which buy off the shelf? Which team structure leads to an architecture for the system that is upgradable for the next 10-15 years? How can manufacturers save costs by reducing the number of embedded systems in their machines?
When developing the operator terminals for their machines, OEMs must reinvent the wheel over and again. Each OEM implements home-grown solutions for standard features like OTA updates, user authentication, factory installation, machine gateways and IoT gateways. None of these features
The ports-and-adapters architecture should be the standard architecture for HMI applications. Its parts are loosely coupled, cohesive, easy to test and easy to extend. We can apply the reverse Conway manoeuvre to create self-dependent teams with minimal dependencies on other
The parking experience at Munich Airport is awful. It is too easy to do something wrong, which can only be remedied by calling support. The bad user experience is caused by a bad system architecture. The pieces for a better
I never got the hang of UML: overly complicated, hard to understand, too close to code. Hence, I was skeptical about C4 diagrams when I first heard about them. When I saw Simon Brown using them in his talk Modular
CMake uses Graphviz to generate dependency graphs between the targets of a CMake project like libraries and executables. The graphs help us get an idea of the software architecture and identify the dependency hot spots. Generating Dependency Graphs My running
I gave a talk at Meeting Embedded 2021 on 4 November 2021. First, I introduced the hexagonal architecture (a.k.a. ports-and-adapters architecture) in general. Then, I showed a walking skeleton of the architecture for a harvester terminal. Here is
Creating an architecture means answering many questions about the ecosystem, in which the Qt embedded system operates. While the questions are very similar for all Qt embedded systems, the answers and their priorities differ. So, you should be able to
Our quest for a successful architecture of a harvester terminal continues. In this episode, we discuss when a system with a single application is good enough and when a system with multiple applications and a window manager is the better
Operator conditions like light, temperature, water, dust and vibration are a rich source for constraints and qualities of a system architecture. They affect the SoC, display and connector selection, the touch gesture recognition, the communication between system components, the cabling,
Which system-on-chip is best suited for your Qt embedded system? Should you build a custom Linux system with Yocto, use a container OS or a desktop Linux? Should you use Qt Commercial or Qt LGPLv3? How will the system be
"Complexity is anything related to the structure of a software system that makes it hard to understand and modify the system." John Ousterhout, The Philosophy of Software Design, Chapter 2 Complexity is also known as technical debt, which
I evaluated the dependency analyser CppDepend on a real-life embedded application. My goal was to find all dependency cycles between classes in the application. I know that the application contains 50+ dependency cycles. CppDepend only found less than 10% of