| Inside this Issue
SCORE® Integrates VxWorks' ARINC 653 RTOS
DDC-I Increases Flexibility for SCORE Developers
using Wind River's Robust, Partitioned VxWorks AE653 RTOS
Phoenix, AZ — December 01, 2004 — Always
working to help safety-critical embedded system software developers
control costs and compress time to market, DDC-I today announced
integration of the versatile SCORE® (Safety Critical,
Object-oriented, Real-time Embedded) integrated development
environment (IDE) with the Wind River VxWorks® AE653 RTOS, offering
complete ARINC 653-1 compliance and DO-178B Level A certification.
"Statistics show the code load of a typical embedded system
doubling about every two years and an average of sixty-six percent of
projects over budget, while a third fall short functionally,"
explains DDC-I Engineering Manager and SCORE® Product Champion
David Mosley. "Meeting software development goals is getting
harder all the time, and we continue to increase the capabilities of SCORE®
specifically to help developers keep beating the odds."
According to Mosley, the aerospace and defense industry demands a
standardized OS with robust partitioning, which allows uncertified
applications to co-exist with fully certified applications. An ARINC
653 compliant OS, such as VxWorks AE653, meets this need.
Already chosen for development, operation and maintenance of the
systems driving the fuel boom ACU on the new 767 Global Tanker
Transport Aircraft, integration of the VxWorks product increases the
functional reach of SCORE for developers already using the AE653 RTOS.
Including a highly reliable compiler, seamlessly integrated
multi-language debugger and the integrated AE653 RTOS, SCORE® offers
developers with valuable legacy code, especially in Ada and Fortran, a
mature means to migrate to the latest targets and technology, as well
as the ability to extend existing source with newer embedded code.
"Designed specifically for the development of
high-integrity embedded systems, SCORE® provides a unified ARINC 653
solution for the world’s highest performance aerospace applications,
while also offering a flexible, integrated turnkey solution for every
application where safety and reliability are number one," Mosley
concludes.
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SCORE® Version 2.5 Debuts
Fortran Compiler
New Fortran 77 Compiler Continues the
Ever-expanding Range of DDC-I's Multi-language, Multi-target
Migration Options for Legacy Developers
Phoenix, AZ - November 29,
2004 - In keeping with the ever-increasing importance of legacy code
migration among embedded system developers, DDC-I today announced
the addition of a native Fortran compiler in version 2.5 of the
maturing SCORE® (Safety Critical, Object-oriented, Real-time
Embedded) integrated development environment (IDE), in addition to
several key component updates.
"Several customer-driven improvements to
SCORE® are included in SCORE® 2.5," explains David Mosley,
DDC-I Engineering Manager and
SCORE® Product Champion, "but
number one is direct compilation and debugging of Fortran, which
dramatically decreases the complexity of legacy code migration by
allowing developers to maintain code in the original Fortran and
enabling programmers to move easily between Ada 95, C, Embedded C++,
and Fortran source."
According to Mosley, the new Fortran compiler,
based on the ANSI X3.9-1978 Fortran(77) standard, supports all
current processors, as well as the MIL-STD- 1750A, added to version
2.5. Full support for the popular Dy4-181 PowerPC board and
multi-language debugger support for the powerful Abatron JTAG probe
are also new.
Recently performance tested head-to-head against
its predecessor, DDC-I's mature DACS compiler, at the request of a
customer, version 2.5 of the SCORE® compiler generated final code
size results on par with DACS. Improvements found during the test
process are already being integrated, beginning with support for
inlining of non-local programs. Constant recognition has been
greatly improved, especially when dealing with complex structured
constants, resulting in significantly smaller code and data. Machine
code insertions are now context- sensitive.
Based on Win32 and OSF/Motif, the
Windows-oriented "point-and-click" character of the SCORE®
GUI incorporates project tools, online help, tool activation and
other efficient features.
Today, COTS solutions regularly meet project
requirements at a fraction of the cost of in-house development,
while integrated suites like SCORE® make the next big leap,
facilitating flexible migration from different languages and
platforms into a uniform future. The process improvements that modern tools
and languages make possible reach directly to the bottom line, where
thousands of lines of reused code - now including Fortran - can
reduce costs and increase programmer productivity. Outdated tools
migrated to SCORE® gain multi-language, multi-target capability while
placing minimal restrictions on future development.
For customers evaluating SCORE®, DDC-I also offers
their popular Migration Assessment Packages, offering on-site needs
assessment, evaluation and a comprehensive report describing the
complexity and functionality of software migration including:
current systems, utilization, capacity and scalability, resource and
skills planning, education and training, cost evaluation, risk
assessment and any additional recommendations. MAPs are individually
shaped and priced, to help customers with complex applications
achieve project goals on-time and budget.
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Tech Talk
Using "Force_Reset_On_Quit" in the SCORE®
Multi Language Debugger
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By Karl Rehmer
Senior Software Engineer
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The debugger supports an invocation line option
called "force_reset_on_quit" that will cause the debugger
to send a reset command to the board when it quits. Setting this
option in the GUI is done in by a check box in the Project | Tool
Options | Debug | Communication dialog when communication with a
physical target is chosen.
There are several reasons why you may want to
reset a target board after debugging an application. These apply
specifically to the PowerPC target.
First, when using firmware downloading to
download the debugger together with an application for debugging,
the force_reset_on_quit will reset the board, thereby removing the
debug monitor and putting the board back in its original state. The
force_reset_on_quit is also a good way to remove a debug monitor
that is not in ROM.
Another important use is when JTAG debugging on
the PowerPC. Many of the UCCs (User Configurable Code) provided or
written by the user start make assumptions about the initial board
state set by some board provided startup code like MDINK. After a
program has run to some point in the debugger and the debugger
quits, the board may not be in that state. Subsequent debug sessions
may have strange behavior because the UCC did not work properly when
run with the board in that state. A safe way to get the board back
to a known state for the next debugging session is to invoke the
debugger with the force_reset_on_quit option.
Note that if you have not invoked the debugger
with the force_reset_on_quit option, you can still get the effect by
giving the "quit \reset" command in the debugger instead
of the "quit" command. To do this when debugging in the
GUI, the debugger command window should be used to give this
command.
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Why Can’t We All Play Nice?
Ideas for Team Development
Recognize your Differences and Focus on Shared Concerns
By Linda Rising
risingl@acm.org
www.lindarising.org
I don’t know about you, but after the recent
U.S. election, I’m worn out. All the political ads, each party
trying to out-do the other, digging deep into the American psyche
for some touchstone, some area of resonance, trying to grab hearts
and minds. As many of you readers know, I’m interested in patterns
and influence strategies, in fact, I’m happy to give a shameless
promotion for a new book I’ve written with my good friend and
colleague, Mary Lynn Manns. The book is called Fearless Change:
patterns for introducing new ideas. It’s available on Amazon—check
it out!
Sorry, I digress. All during the pre-election
activities, I was barraged by e-mails and phone calls, requests for
support and donations. Although I have always voted, given a certain
number of donations and written a certain number of letters or
e-mails, during this campaign I was more involved, as were many
Americans. I knocked on doors. I made phone calls. I drove people to
the polls on Election Day. Throughout, I was surprised that I
continued to wear my "influence strategist" hat. I could
see that many powerful techniques were being applied by all parties.
I could sense that emotion ruled the day and that logic was out the
window. I remembered a horrible story that someone told me about a
prisoner in a concentration camp during World War II. The camp
residents were forced to listen to Hitler’s speeches and the
prisoner reported that it was all he could do, during the emotional
tirades for which Hitler was so famous, to keep from raising his arm
in salute. We all get carried away. We all respond emotionally, not
intellectually, even in the most dire circumstances—think of
soldiers in battle, going into a hopeless situation with rallying
cries, "Let’s go, guys!" I’ve learned this over and
over in my research in influence strategies and I’ve written a few
columns for this newsletter. It still surprises me when I see it up
close in real life.
Somehow, being a part of the pre-and
post-election furor, I found myself wondering why these techniques
are so powerful. I had learned that the patterns that others and I
have observed are symptoms of behavior that social psychologists
study. Their research provides data that validates the patterns, but
was there more? I was looking for a way around what happens in an
activity like an election—we take sides. Actually, we do this all
day, every day. We say, "We’re <on this side>, and you’re
<on that side>." The sides can be: North and South, black
and white, Christian and Muslim, Red State and Blue State,
Republican and Democrat, tall and short, fat and skinny. The list
goes on and on. Do you know what I’m talking about? I know I do
it.
I know you can use this tendency to influence
others—you can convince me that we’re on the "same
side" so then I’ll buy your product or work for your company.
But, I keep coming back to my question: "What’s underneath
all this?" I’m looking for a way out, some hope. Is there
something more than the data from the sociological experiments? And
if there is more, what can we learn about helping our country, our
organizations, our teams, and, of course, ourselves?
I’m in the midst of a giant upheaval as my
husband and I prepare to have new carpeting and tile installed in
our house. It’s almost like moving out. I have been using this as
an excuse to go through the embarrassing number of books, journals
and magazines, and papers I keep. In the process, I get stuck in a
particular stack of interesting material and lose track of time
reading and re-reading things I had forgotten all about. In this
seemingly random process, I just discovered in the last few days an
answer to my question. It was in an article from Harvard Business
Review, published quite a while ago (in Internet time scale),
July-August 1998. The author is Nigel Nicholson and the title, yes,
the title speaks volumes: "How Hardwired Is Human
Behavior?" The article introduced me (‘way back before my
interest in influence strategies) to evolutionary psychology. It
gave me an answer to a question I hadn’t asked yet, so I forgot
all about it. Re-reading this article led me to more recent research
in this area so now I can share my discoveries with you.
To uncover the answer to my question, we have to
go back a few years—200,000 of them, to be exact—when human
beings or Homo sapiens first appeared on Africa’s Savannah
Plain. Our Stone Age hunter-gatherer ancestors were focused on
survival. That translates to having food and shelter and a mate to
reproduce the species. A lot has happened since then. But scientists
who study this kind of thing—evolutionary psychologists—say that
we’re still carrying pretty much the same brain that we used ‘way
back when. Researchers say that the drivers for evolutionary change
have not been present to bring our mental equipment up to date. One
way of expressing their view is: You can take the person out of the
Stone Age, but you can’t take the Stone Age out of the person!
We humans have spent more than 99% of our
evolutionary history living in hunter-gatherer societies—small,
nomadic "teams" of a few dozen individuals who got their
daily "bread" by gathering plants or hunting. Some might
say that our ancestors were on a camping trip that lasted their
whole lives. This is how it was for most of the last 10 million
years.
Humans have lived as hunter-gatherers 1000 times
longer than as anything else. The complicated world that we know
today has been around for only a fraction of a second (in the grand
scheme of things). The computer age is only a little older than the
typical college student, and the industrial revolution is a mere 200
years old. Agriculture first appeared on earth only 10,000 years
ago, and it wasn't until about 5,000 years ago that as many as half
of the human population engaged in farming rather than hunting and
gathering.
Over this time, the human brain developed. The
process favored brains that were better at solving day-to-day
problems: choosing shelter, hunting animals, gathering plants,
negotiating with friends, defending against aggressors, finding
mates, raising children, and so on. Those with better brains left
more children and ultimately produced us! The key to understanding
how our brain works is to realize that it did not develop to solve
the day-to-day problems of a modern human. Our brains developed to
solve the day-to-day problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
Before we proceed, let’s stop to consider that
scientists are not saying that we all think in exactly the same way.
Psychologists of any flavor would be the first to point out that
their experiments are valid for populations—there are always
exceptional individuals (in any sense). Clearly there are different
traits due to familial genetics and culture. What we hope to learn
by looking at this research is the characteristics that have been
shown by these studies that can help us uncover traits shared by
large populations.
Let’s now look at those drivers for
evolutionary change that I mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago. We
know that the world changed radically with the invention of
agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago. Human beings were freed
from hand-to-mouth subsistence. After this point, a series of rapid
developments brought us to modern civilization. Surely, we’re now
better equipped to face a much more complex environment.
Unfortunately there are three considerations that result in our
brains pretty much remaining the same as they were in the Stone Age.
(1) By around 50,000 years ago, human populations had scattered
across the globe so that genetic mental mutations could not possibly
spread. (2) There haven’t been any consistent new environmental
pressures on humans that would produce further evolution. (3) 10,000
years seems like a long time but it’s not nearly enough for
significant genetic modifications to become established across the
population. Thus, evolutionary psychologists argue that although the
world has changed, human beings have not.
Here’s what we know about life on that African
Plain all those years ago. Life was short and hazardous. Food,
clothing, and shelter were unreliable and varied in quality.
Life-threatening dangers abounded. Survival for early humans meant
dependence on their brains. The behaviors that served them best
became hardwired and continue to drive human behavior today.
I was able to find the behavior I was
particularly interested in—the one that will help answer my
question. Here it is: Stone Age hunter-gatherers constantly faced
new puzzles. Which plants can be eaten without becoming sick or
dying? Where is good hunting to be found? How can we tell whether
someone can be trusted?
To provide structure to an uncertain world, our
ancestors developed an impressive talent for sorting and classifying
information. Researchers have found that even in some existing
nonliterate tribes there is complete taxonomic knowledge of the
animals and plants in their environment. We humans are great at
creating categories for everything in our lives.
In the Stone Age, of course, these capabilities
were not limited to the natural environment. To prosper in their
clan, human beings had to become expert at making the correct
alliances. They had to know whom to share food with—someone who
would return the favor if needed. They had to know what
untrustworthy individuals generally looked like, because it would be
unwise to deal with them.
Human beings became hardwired to stereotype
people based on very small pieces of evidence, mainly their
appearance and a few readily apparent behaviors.
Whether it was sorting plants or people, both
worked to the same end. Classification made life simpler and saved
time and energy. When you had food to share, you didn’t have to
waste time deciding who could and couldn’t be trusted. Your
classification system told you instantly. When a new group entered
your territory, you could pick out the high-status members not to
alienate. The faster you made decisions like these, the more likely
you were to survive. Sitting around analyzing options and next
steps, following a complex decision-making process, was not a recipe
for a long and fertile life.
The power of classification remains with us
today. People naturally sort others into in-groups and out-groups,
just by their appearance and actions. We continuously subconsciously
(and sometimes consciously) label other people: "She’s a
snob," or "He’s a bozo." Research has shown that
managers sort their employees into winners and losers as early as
three weeks after starting to work with them.
People are complex and many sided. It is
interesting, yet frightening, to know that we are programmed not
to see them as such. This helps to explain why some groups in
organizations have trouble getting along. The battle between
marketing and manufacturing is as old as—well, as old as marketing
and manufacturing. Techies in IT departments have difficulty getting
along with the groups they are supposed to support, and vice versa.
We are all too busy labeling others as outsiders and dismissing them
in the process.
Our programming for classification, sorting
people into in-groups and out-groups, can make us harshly judge
those we decide are in the out-group. We will focus on and
exaggerate the differences we perceive. We may wish that human
beings were more rational, but our brains, created for a different
time and place, get in the way. We need a better approach now more
than ever. The world is increasingly complex and we must make
tougher decisions faster. We are incurring enormous costs by
exercising our Stone Age decision-making process in complex
information-based environments.
To bring this home, I thought I would share some
examples from retrospectives I’ve facilitated at companies all
over the world (just so you won’t think this is a problem specific
to the U.S.). In one company, an enormous amount of time was spent
(both on the project and in the retrospective) addressing the
concerns of one sub-team whose members did not get a t-shirt,
while all other teams working on the project did! The have-not
sub-team initially raised the issue at the retrospective. We
captured it on a card and moved on, but the have-not sub-team kept
coming back to it. Each new issue was somehow tied to the t-shirts!
How did this team lose out? It was an honest mistake. A new project
lead intended to buy t-shirts for members of all the teams, but
somehow overlooked the have-not sub-team—probably because it was
not co-located (see the next story).
Research has shown that clothing is a strong
identifier for groups. (Why do you think the military provides
uniforms?) In Fearless Change, Mary Lynn and I describe a
pattern we call Group Identity. When a name, slogan, symbol, or
t-shirt is adopted by a group, there is a clear call to the
hardwired "us against them" behavior we all share.
Managers, leaders, be aware of the power of identity! Yes, it helps
to "jell" a team. Yes, it can give lagging team spirits a
boost. But it also causes a division between the team and the rest
of the organization. All teams nowadays need to work and play well
with others: support groups, external testers, and, of course,
clients, users, and customers! If you must have names, slogans,
symbols, or t-shirts, disseminate them widely to involve as many
others as possible.
Here’s another story. A project team grew
rapidly in a short time (lots of interesting material there!). The
software folks ended up sitting in cubicles on either side of the
hardware guys. During the retrospective we learned that both groups
of software developers got along just fine with the hardware guys,
but not with each other. The two software "camps" rarely
spoke. Out of this "us against them" created by the
separation in cubicle space, two architecture leaders emerged, each
with a different vision for the product. There was so little
understanding by each software group of the architecture of the
other software group that when the time came, the software pieces
wouldn’t integrate. The end result was a lot of blaming and finger
pointing, and, ultimately, an effort that produced nothing.
In product development, as in real estate, what
counts is location, location, location (another pattern in Fearless!).
Meaningful communication decreases as distance increases. When team
members sit close together, communication goes up. Those who are not
close are automatically in the out-group. Without meaningful
communication, misunderstandings arise, motives are assigned, and
assumptions raised. It doesn’t take long for "wars" to
break out. To overcome this strong tendency to see others who are
separated by distance as "outsiders," find ways of
gathering all people who are on a project. A Friday afternoon pizza
party will work. Get everyone in the same room with the freedom to
walk around and share ideas.
Evolutionary psychologists say that our primitive
brains, so well adapted to the precarious life of hunter-gathers,
will continue to dictate our behavior. In the choices businesspeople
make, one can expect the hidden agendas of categorical thinking to
prevail. I know I’ve learned how important it is for us to have a
better understanding of our biased natures so that we can be aware
and take appropriate measures to better meet our daily challenges. I
hope you agree that it’s time to recognize our developmental
history and use this information to live in harmony with our
hardwiring.
The bottom line is: yes, we are hardwired; no, we
can’t do anything about that; yes, being aware will help us be
proactive and do what we can to counteract these inborn traits. At
the national level, instead of saying, "I’m green and you’re
blue," (fill in your favorite color), we can start by looking
for a common vocabulary. Words that reflect shared concerns will be
evidence that we’re on the "same side." Let’s have
conversations about: jobs, health care, education, and, especially
in our troubled world, peace. Anyone remember Dave Garroway? He was
the first host of the Today Show. He always ended the show by
holding up his hand and saying one word, "Peace."
http://people.uncw.edu/rohlerl/rohler/clc.htm#garroway
The Iroquois Indians had a masterful way of
negotiating conflict. Each person had to struggle to get to the
point where he could articulate the other’s position. This
enhances collegiality instead of escalating the tendency of
teammates who disagree to think of themselves as being on opposite
sides. In other words, it changes the dynamic from our hardwired
"us against them" to see ourselves as working to resolve
an issue together.
I quoted Red Green (www.redgreen.com)
in my last column and I think it’s appropriate here: Remember, I’m
pullin’ for you. We’re all in this together!
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About the Author
http://www.lindarising.org
risingl@acm.org
Linda Rising has a Ph.D. from Arizona
State University in the area of object-based design metrics.
Her background includes university teaching as well as work
in industry in telecommunications, avionics, and strategic
weapons systems. She is the author of numerous articles and
has published three books: Design Patterns in
Communications, The Pattern Almanac 2000, and A Patterns
Handbook. She is currently writing a book with Mary Lynn
Manns: Fearless: Introducing New Ideas into Organizations, to appear in September 2004. |
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