How to Develop Better
Firmware Faster
A one-day course for engineers who must develop high-quality embedded
firmware on ever shorter schedules.
Seminars are now scheduled on the following dates and locations:
April 23, 2008 - Chicago
Hilton Oak Lawn
9333 Cicero Avenue
Oak Lawn, IL
April 25, 2008 - Denver
Embassy Suites Hotel
Denver Southeast/North Tech Center
7525 East Hampden Ave, Denver, CO
May 19, 2008 - London, UK
Jurys Inn Heathrow
Eastern Perimeter Road
Hatton Cross, Hounslow
Check your calendars and sign up early.
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Register early and get a $50.00 discount. Groups of 3 or
more paying together get $100.00 off each person. See
registration
info below to
see how you can attend, or click on
brochure and go
directly to the registration form.
Click
here for more info
on how we can present this seminar at your company.
Course
Summary
This one day course will teach you practical - and proven - ways to develop
better firmware faster. It's for the developer who is honestly looking
for new ideas, but who wants to cut through the academic fluff of formal
methodologies and find better ways to work now.
The focus is uniquely on embedded systems, where firmware can only be
understood in the context of the hardware. You'll learn new ways to link the
hardware and software, to stamp out bugs, to manage real-time
constraints, to meet impossible deadlines and much, much
more.
The course is targeted to developers engaged in creating products
now who
must find ways to work more efficiently. It assumes some knowledge of C
and a basic understanding of any assembly language.
Each attendee will be awarded 0.7
Continuing Education Units.
Seminar
Schedule
8-9am - Get settled, refreshments
available, seating
9:00 - Seminar starts
10:30 - 10 minute break
12:00 - Break for lunch
1:00 - Seminar resumes
2:30 - 10 minute break, refreshments available
4:00 - 4:30 - Seminar ends
There is a continental breakfast
for all attendees to enjoy, coffee and other beverages
throughout the day and sweet snacks in
the afternoon. Jack will stay after the seminar for as long as
people would like to discuss the material.
Comments from Attendees
Thanks so much for your time and for the great seminar.
I took more away from it than I could have imagined.
Adam Roman
Jack's seminar, "The Best Ideas
for Developing Better Firmware Faster" has to be the most interesting
and enjoyable I have ever gone to and that's saying something as I have
been to quite a few during my career over the years. Josh
Hurvitz, Space Technology
Damn you were good, and I talk
for all the boys. I think that I have been to around 100 seminars the
last couple of years, and I have bored myself to death every single
time, but this one was great, I’m amazed how good and fun it was.
Soeren Panduro, APCC
Thanks for a valuable, pragmatic, and informative lesson in
embedded systems design. All the attendees thought it was
well worth their time.
Craig DeFilippo, Pitney Bowes
I just wanted to thank you again for the great class last week.
With no exceptions, all of the feedback from the participants
was extremely positive. We look forward to incorporating many
of the suggestions and observations into making our work here ore efficient and higher quality.
Carol Batman, INDesign LLC.
Thanks a lot for a great seminar. We really enjoyed it! We're
already putting to use some of the ideas you gave us.
J. Sarget, CSC
Thanks for the terrific seminar here at ALSTOM yesterday! It
got rave reviews from a pretty tough crowd.
Cheryl Saks, ALSTOM
Jack, it's been 6 months since
you came here. This last project shipped within a week of prediction,
with far more features than expected. The customer is thrilled and so is
my boss. Thanks!
F. Henry, CACI
Thanks so much for a great
class! Now my co-workers think I'm the guru!
Dana Woodring, Northrup Grumman
I would highly recommend
your seminar to other programmers.
Ed Chehovin, US Navy
See registration
info below to
see how you can attend, or click on
brochure and go
directly to the registration form.
Presenter
Your presenter is Jack Ganssle, the industry's most renowned embedded system architect. He
has written over 600 articles and six books about embedded systems.
Jack lectures internationally to conferences and businesses.
He founded three electronics companies, including one of the largest
embedded tool providers, and is now a member of NASA's Super Problem
Resolution Team, a small panel of experts formed to advise NASA in the
wake of Columbia's loss. His extensive product development experience
forged his unique approach to building better firmware faster.
Jack has helped over 400 companies and thousands of developers
improve their firmware and consistently deliver better products on-time
and on-budget.
Some Previous
Attendees
Intel Schlumberger
NASA IBM
Motorola
TI
Phoenix
Visteon
Whirlpool
Kodak
Cutler-Hammer
HP
Pitney Bowes
Bayer
Siemens
Honeywell
Northrop Grumman
Dell
Sony Ericsson
Raytheon
Why Take This Course?
Are you satisfied with the way your company develops embedded products?
If the answer is "yes" you're most likely already using the concepts from this
class. If, however, you're like most of the people in this industry, you realize
that there's a lot of room for improvement.
Do these situations sound familiar?
- Deadlines come and go yet the product still doesn't ship.
- You never really know the status of a project. It's almost "done" but
new problems appear daily pushing final release ever further away.
- Marketing monkeys with the features even as you're in the middle of
writing code.
- "Creeping featurism" makes the product's design a moving target
- Bugs plague the entire development effort, consuming vast resources
- Post-release bugs continue to haunt the development team, creating
never-ending support headaches.
Most organizations fall into a fatalistic acceptance of these sorts of problems,
never realizing that a number of well-known methods can eliminate much of
the agony of product development.
The
"twisted triad"- balancing three competing forces
Engineering is one of the few professions learned mostly on the job. Colleges
prepare people with a fine theoretical background, but the skills needed to
schedule, manage, and daily work towards a final product come from mostly
casual mentoring by co-workers. Why don't we train developers in the art of
doing projects?
What is your department's most expensive resource? It's the one asset
you have to get products to market: the developers' time. No doubt you
replace and upgrade tools, compilers and the like from time to time. What are
you doing to upgrade your skills, or the skills of your engineers?
With
a bit of practice you can reduce bug rates - and tremendously
speed product release/
In this course you'll learn how to get your products to market faster, with
fewer defects. The presentation and recommendations are practical,
immediately useful, and tightly focused on embedded system development -
this is not another noble but ultimately discarded software methodology.
Do those C/C++ runtime routines execute in a usec or a
week? This trig function is
all over the map, from 6 to
15 msec. You’ll learn to write
real- time code proactively,
anticipating timing issues before debugging.
Course Outline
- C, C++ or Java?
- Code reuse - a myth? How can you benefit?
- The realities behind software reuse
- Stacks and heaps - deadly resources you can control.
- Manage features... or miss the schedule!
- Do commercial RTOSes make sense?
- Overcoming Deadline Madness
- Negotiating realistic deadlines.
- Scheduling - the science versus the art.
- Overcoming the biggest productivity busters.
- Unhappy truths of ICEs, BDMs, and debuggers.
- Managing bugs rather than reacting.
- Quick code inspections that keep the schedule on-track.
- Cool ways to find hardware/software glitches.
- Design predictable real-time code.
- Preventing system performance debacles.
- Reentrancy - eliminating erratic crashes.
- Build better interrupt handlers.
- Understanding high-speed signal problems.
- Adding a feed-back loop to your development process.
- Using postmortems to accelerate the product delivery.
- Seven step plan to firmware success.
Registration information
All of this, plus a 150 page handout and 0.7 continuing education units, for $695 per person.
Register a month in advance and receive a $50.00 discount.
Groups of 3 or more paying together pay only $595
per person.
The Registration form can be found on last page of
the
brochure.
Use one of these three easy ways to pay:
- By Fax: Fax your PO to us at (647) 439-1454.
- By Check: Make checks payable to TGG, and mail along with your
registration form to The Ganssle Group, PO Box 38346, Baltimore, MD 21231.
- By Visa/MasterCard/Amex: Just fill out the registration form that can be
found on the last page of the brochure and fax it
to us. Or, call in your
registration to (410) 504-6660.
Payments are due two weeks before the course starts. Written
cancellations are completely refundable, less a $50 processing fee, if made more than 14 days prior to the course. Cancellations
made within 14 days are non-refundable, but are 100% transferable to any
other course we offer.
The Ganssle Group
PO Box 38346, Baltimore, MD
21231
Tel: 410-504-6660, Fax: 647-439-1454
Email info@ganssle.com
© 2008 The Ganssle Group
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