1. Project Management

2. Option 1: Waterfall Development
Changes cheap
Changes expensive
Up front planning
Phases: concept to detailed implementation

3. Option 2: Iterative/Agile Development
Plan, but quickly
Later parts of the plan more coarse
Prototype
Refine
Test & Evaluate
Includes end-user / customer evaluation

4. Waterfall vs. Agile? Strengths and weaknesses of each?
Your team’s preference?

5. Waterfall vs. Agile? Strengths and weaknesses of each?
Waterfall strength: efficient if you can plan well
Agile strength: it’s hard to plan well  iterate quickly instead
Waterfall weakness: planning paralysis
Agile methods now dominant in software
Also common in HW
Spreading to other industries (SpaceX, Tesla, …)
Wikipedia vs. Nupedia: agile won

6. Agile: Prototype Early
Not having a working system is very dangerous
Don’t know when/if the system will work
Engineers can’t test their work in the whole system
Don’t know where the problem areas to improve / optimize will be
Get something simple working
Test & Measure
Add features / Improve problem areas
Repeat
Keep it simple!
Use simplest approach that works

7. One Flavour of “Agile”: Scrum
image: ecomcanada.org
Choose features for 21-day sprint
Team meets each day for 15 min scrum
End of each sprint  working SW for customer

8. Set Measurable Milestones
Key to keeping larger projects on track

9. Agile Development & Companies
Harvard Business Review: “Why the lean start-up changes everything”
Agile development applied to entire business of start-ups
Simplest possible prototype!
Iterate!
Image: leadnet.org

10. Project/Teams Course Roadmap
More waterfall
More specification
APS 111/112
More agile
More implement + measure
ECE 297
ECE 496: Capstone project
APS 343: Engineering Leadership
iLead: project management workshops
Jan. 30 & Feb. 5: project management
Specify & implement
PEY & Career

11. Case Study:
Case Study #1

12. Background My PhD thesis: new CAD System for FPGAs
Formed company to commercialize
4 people initially
An early customer was Altera
10 months to produce a new “placement and routing” system for Altera’s chips
Aggressive goal: 10X better than current system

13. Place and Route Example

14. Project Management Quick plan Concrete milestones Scared
1 day: estimate all tasks & time
Add time margin (mine: 50%)
Concrete milestones
Meet a milestone every 3 months or don’t get paid!
Scared
Turned out to be helpful!
Avoid any side projects, unnecessary complexity
Get something working, measure & improve
Measure our software vs. Altera’s every day

15. Outcome Hit all milestones, except first (2 weeks late)
Focused!
CAD system exceeded expectations
30X less runtime
38% faster circuits
Altera replaced their P & R engine with the prototype
Started simple, measured where to improve
Some simple algorithms still in current Quartus  didn’t need more!

16. Case Study 2: (First Version of) Quartus

17. Background Altera had highly successful CAD system: Max+PlusII
Decided to do a complete re-write to a new CAD system
Quartus
Goals:
C++ (not C)
Cleaner, more extensible code
Allow multiple engineers to collaborate on a project easily
Allow fast, “incremental” recompiles

18. Project Management Planned for a year with no coding
Too much waterfall  planning paralysis
Let complexity reign
Fancy user features
Fancy language (object oriented C++ to the max)
No working prototype for ~2 years
Can’t test new features in full system
Didn’t understand & measure key metric
CAD system that optimizes well
And is ready for next-generation chip

19. Outcome Software not ready in time for chip Software rushed to market
Not stable enough, didn’t optimize well enough
Very bad customer experiences
Lost sales: $billions!
Rewrote & renamed later versions:
Now very good!

20. Case Study 3: Hardware + Software (Stratix V)

21. State of the art for 2 years!
Big Project!
More planning?
3 year project
~500 engineers at peak
Yes, plan as far ahead as you can
But don’t paralyze yourself
Accept that plan gets coarse as you go out in time
Key plan: measurable milestones
3 year project  need to break up schedule
Project milestones  goals / milestones per team
Clear must have features
Everything else: nice to have
> $200 M
State of the art for 2 years! +

22. Agile / Iterative Development?
Build prototype / model of HW + SW system
Use to evaluate and test new ideas
Done by smaller team (~10 engineers)
Will never ship to customers!
Prototype shows good results?
Build real hardware & full software
Team grows to 500
Always keep system working as you improve
Always measure results vs. expected (from prototype)
HW & SW both in source code control
Still iterative, but with more structure

23. Communication? Weekly status meeting Meeting style
For sub-teams (~8 engineers)
Managers discuss results for ~8 teams (~64 people)
Directors discuss overall status (~500 people)
Meeting style
wiki, crisp reporting
Big picture  progress toward milestones

24. Outcome Iterative development of HW + SW
Much better than pure waterfall
Many companies: out of business by not getting full HW + SW system working
Every 2nd generation: usually late!
Engineers & marketing put in too much complexity
Not scared enough, not enough iterative development!
Late to market is terrible
Competitor has twice the transistors, 1 year earlier
Want to optimize, but on time more important

25. Testing

26. Testing Philosophy “If you didn’t test it, it doesn’t work”
Assume all code broken until proven otherwise
Look at what the program does not what it is supposed to do
Scientist: you are testing hypotheses about program
Think of every case your program should handle  cover them all

27. Testing Time Develop tests as or before you code
Test-driven development
Prototype
Refine
Test & Evaluate