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Bring this class to your company! Click here to find how we can come to your facility and present the class.

 

Attendee Comments

The Presenter

Why Attend?

Course Outline

Registration Info

 

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.

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