Engenio’s Product Line Development Challenges

The demand for Engenio’s RAID storage server products was rapidly outpacing the firmware development team’s ability to create, evolve and maintain the firmware for those products. The company’s success, combined with changing product line strategies and turbulent market conditions put overwhelming pressures on the team to expand their development capabilities. It soon became clear that conventional development approaches – which centered on individual product releases – were no longer viable for keeping pace.

In the midst of market-driven turbulence, the need for a shift within the engineering group at Engenio was not readily apparent. Instead, the need for change gradually became evident, as the Engenio team experienced the evolution from a single product to multiple, sequentially released products, and finally, to multiple products released on parallel and intertwined schedules.

Market demands drive multi-product development

Initially, Engenio’s firmware was constructed as a single software build, applicable to all deployments. Product variability was resolved at runtime, using downloadable configuration data stored in non-volatile memory. Evolution of the firmware was managed in a sequential manner, where each release was transitioned through the stages of analysis, design, implementation and test. Once a release was complete and shipping to customers, work on the next release would begin.

Over time, as new hardware platforms with substantial differences were added to the portfolio, the development team created separate software builds to manage portions of the product variability. This solved the immediate problem of supporting the variation among new and existing products; however, it proved to be a less than ideal way to manage the commonality. Eventually, as multi-product development demands increased, Engenio’s “tranquil world” of sequential releases was replaced with the market demands of a half dozen intertwined and overlapping release cycles.

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