Last night was the Casey Business Awards gala dinner where the Casey Business Awards were given out for 2010.  We are very pleased to have been awarded the Casey Business of the Year for 2010.  It was a great night and Casey Mayor, Cr Lorraine Wreford presented the award to Ray and Junette Keefe of Successful Endeavours.

Successful Endeavours were also joint winners of the Business and Professional Services award for 2010.

And we were finalists in the Manufacturer of the Year category which was won by Jain and Janice Lal at Australian Solar Manufacturing. They make high grade 200W solar panels in Hallam, as good as you can get anywhere in the world, and really deserved their win.  Well done Jain and Janice.

Casey Business Awards 2010

Above is a shot of the Casey Business Award Certificates and also the trophies we received on the night.

And here we are with Casey Mayor, Cr Lorraine Wreford, with the Casey Business of the Year award certificate and trophy.

Ray and Junette Keefe of Successful Endeavours with Casey Mayor Cr Lorraine Wreford - Casey Business Of The Year

Here we are with the joint winners of the Business and Professional Services award, Better Dental Care and a representative of Monash University who sponsored this award category.

Casey Business and Professional Services award

And here is a picture of the 3 award certificates together.

Successful Endeavours Casey Business Awards 2010

And the Casey Weekly (formerly Berwick & District Journal) on 7 September 2010 ran a 2 page special on the Casey Business Awards and this is an except from that covering our win as Casey Business of the Year 2010.

Successful Endeavours - Casey Business of the Year 2010

Below are media releases  and official City of Casey web pages related to Successful Endeavours’ win as Casey Business of the Year and also as joint winners of the Business and Professional Services award.

The City of Casey Business Media Release Successful Endeavours named Casey Business of the Year

The City of Casey official Casey Business Awards page

The Greater Dandenong Weekly 30 August 2010 Company Wired For Top Award

The Casey Weekly Cranbourne 30 August 2010 Wired for success

The Casey Weekly Berwick 31 August 2010 Wired to win the big prize

The Cranbourne News 2 September 2010 Business Backed

AMTIL News feature AMTIL Member ‘Successful Endeavours’ wins 2010 Casey Business of the Year

And we thank our clients and suppliers for being the excellent businesses they are.  This would not have been possible without you.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright  © Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Casey Business Awards

We already let you know that we are finalists in 2 of the 9 categories for the City Of Casey inaugural Casey Business Awards in our post about being Casey Business Awards Finalists. The Casey Business Awards categories we are finalists in are:

• Manufacturer Of The Year
• Business and Professional Services

The news has been picked up by one of our local Newspapers, The Greater Dandenong Weekly, who ran the following article about us and the other finalists.  It is good to see so many strong contenders and our economy certainly needs strong businesses to continue to give both the employment and prosperity we have come to enjoy.

The Journal - Successful Endeavours

Our congratulations go out to the other finalists and we will find out who the winners are on Friday 27th August at the Casey Business Awards gala dinner.

It is good to see the Electronics Design, Embedded Software Development and Low Cost Electronics Manufacture featuring so strongly in the local Australian economy.  We especially note that Australian Solar Manufacturing is also a finalist in the Manufacturer of the Year category and we wish Jain and Janice Lal all the best with their nomination.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Squash Lessons for Engineering

The picture in today’s post comes courtesy of Dr Marc Dussault, The Exponential Growth Strategist. At his recent Exponential Business Building Bootcamp, he demonstrated how a Squash Racquet gets broken from repeated use.

Broken Squash Racquet

So what does this have to do with Engineering? Glad you asked.

First, I have to explain the demonstration. Marc showed that it takes a very large amount of force to break the Squash Racquet.  He really applied himself to the destructive task and it took a few minutes of escalating Squash Racquet abuse before it finally succumbed and broke.  Some of us in the front of the room could tell just how much it required to break the Squash Racquet. However the Squash Racket already had a crack, so Marc knew where to apply the force in order to break it.  The picture above is the final outcome.  Without the crack being obvious, it would have been almost impossible to have broken the Squash Racquet using just randomly applied force.

Marc then explained that way the Squash Racquet became cracked in the first place, was by it being consistently scraped along the wall as he retrieved the ball from shots along the wall.  Marc is an outstanding competitive squash player and currently ranks  as World # 18! So he knows his stuff when it comes to squash.  You can read more about this at his Mindset Of A Champion blog.

So if you know what to look for, you can monitor the thinning of the racquet and get an idea of when and where it might fail.  If you don’t know what to look for, then the failure will be unexpected.

Software Testing and Software Engineering

A lot of Software Testing can suffer from the same problem.  If you already know where the weakness will be and how to spot it, then finding a bug is easy.  You can set up the scenario, monitor for the symptom and confirm the failure.  Or, if you have enough resources you can go the brute force approach and just break it through the persistent use of randomly directed and escalated force of testing.  However very products are simple enough and very few companies are large enough to have that level of resource and to solve the problem this way.  So for the rest of us, the other 99.995%, a more intelligent approach is needed.

Since you don’t know where and when it will fail, it is best to remove failure causes from the beginning. This is where Software Engineering come is. Software Engineering is not just coding.  Coding is the production end of the Software Engineering process.  Software Engineering is about designing the system so you have defined the components so they are each fully testable in their own right. Then you can apply processes like Unit Testing to ensure they are fully functional as stand alone pieces of software. You can then perform Integration Testing to ensure that software added to the system correctly handles both the Execution Flow, also known as Control Flow, and Data Flow required including error and Exception Handling. The result is that you build up a fully working and correctly executing system quickly and with great confidence. It isn’t a magic bullet but it is close to it.

As was famously quipped by Edsger Dijkstra, “If Debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in”.

So if you put less bugs in, you have less debugging to do. And that saves time and removes future time bombs.  Because the chance that you find them all is zero percent. And you can’t create a system that is 100% testable by brute force means. So you have to go about it smarter.  It will save time, money and improve the business outcome now and into the future.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © 2010  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Software Testing

I recently met with an Australian Software Development company, PepperStack, and we got onto the subject of Software Testing. As someone who began their career as an Electronics Hardware Engineer, one of the things I learnt was that you have to test thoroughly to be sure everything is working as it should be. With Electronics, if you make a mistake with an Engineering Calculation you can easily destroy things. This is sometimes referred to as “letting the smoke out”. So it was good to meet with others who believe in the same level of rigorous software unit, module and system testing that we do.

Some Engineering Humour

Which reminds me of a joke I once heard:

There are 3 Engineers in a car going for a drive. The first is a Mechanical Engineer, the second an Electronics Engineer and the third is a Software Engineer. Fortunately the Mechanical Engineer is driving because the brakes fail and they are going downhill.  The Mechanical Engineer eventually brings the car safely to a halt and gets out to examine the hydraulic systems.  The Electronics Engineer gets out and checks and body computer, ABS system and the power train CAN bus.  The Software Engineer stays in the car and when queried about it says that they should all just get back in the car and see if it happens again!

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not having a go at Software Engineers. The process of finding and eliminating faults is a very important part of the development cycle and is something that needs up front thinking and not just responding to symptoms.  And the more complex or sophisticated a system is, that harder it is to fully test every possible response to every possible stimuli and after a certain point it becomes impractical to have 100% Test Coverage (every line of code has been executed through all of the possible states).  The reason this is a bigger problem with Software Development is that the flexibility of software means that it is inherently complex and it takes skill and planning to manage that complexity so it is testable.

So here is the issue. More than any other discipline, faults can be experienced by an end user of a product under a situation or scenario you could not have proactively tested against before release.  There are many potential reasons for this including:

• change of hardware or operating system environment
• new standards or protocols
• the sheer number of potential combinations of drivers, peripherals, software and users
• the product being used for a purpose it wasn’t originally designed for
• gamma ray corruption of a memory location – I am getting esoteric now but in some areas like avionics and space this is a big threat

So how do you reduce the likelihood of these problems occurring?

Improving Software Quality

With many new products having Electronics and Embedded Software and the Software Development requiring 80% of the effort, it is important to delivery it as quickly and fault free as you can. The main weapons in your Software Quality arsenal have been known about for a long time but are, in our experience, just not used.  These are:

• Architectural Design – work out how the data and execution flow will happen and how you will manage the constraints
• Functional Decomposition – divide and conquer but with an emphasis on how each module fits into the system and how the interfaces work in detail
• Error handling - who will decide what to do with response codes – again this is data and execution flow and part of the architecture. In many cases exception management is at least 50% of the project.
• Have an Integration Test Plan – some thing that proves the data and execution flow matches the architectural design.  Too often “it builds” seems to be good enough here.
• Unit Test modules – so you remove all the issues before adding them to the integration
• Do the Integration Tests before you try system testing
• Design modules so you can integrate them as shells then add functionality down the track
• Have NVM and configuration data available at the beginning of the project and not as an after thought at the end
• Have a System Test Plan and use it
• Use some of the good practices of Test Driven Development – run the tests every time you change the code
• Have a rationale for what level of Code Coverage you can accept
• Have a rationale for what level of Churn you can accept – Churn is the percentage of the lines of code that have changed in the past time period.  Usually either a week or month depending on the size of the project.
• Use automated software quality tools. For instance we use both PC-Lint and RSM to automated many software quality metrics which saves a lot of time in Code Reviews
• Use Code Reviews, also known as Software Peer Review.  It really does save time.

Next I plan to look at what you can learn about software testing from a Squash Racquet.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © 2010  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Ross Brinsdon of Can-Tek

We are so pleased to announce that Ross Brinsdon of Can-Tek has won the latest episode of the ABC program The New Inventors with his water based aerosol touch up paint product which allows you to get exactly the custom colour you want in an aerosol can that is loaded in store and is water based so you can clean it off before it dries if you make a mistake. And it is environmentally friendly as well.

The secret is in the chemistry added to the can that reduces the surface tension of water so the paint sprays and coats evenly.  This is a major challenge for water based paints and to be able to do it in store with the colour of your choice is a major advance in this area of technology.

We have had a couple of electronics products we worked on win on The New Inventors so we really appreciate the work it takes and that you don’t get these awards without having a serious advance.  You can also check out our Electronics Awards.

So well done Ross Brinsdon.  Keep up the good work.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Casey Business Awards

The City Of Casey are holding there inaugural Casey Business Awards and at the Casey Business Breakfast this morning Successful Endeavours were nominated as finalists in 2 categories.

Casey Business Awards

The 2 Casey Business Awards categories are:

• Manufacturer Of The Year
• Business and Professional Services

We fall into the Business And Professional Services category with our Electronics and Embedded Software development services where we design products for Australian Electronics Manufacturers  so they can achieve Low Cost Electronics Manufacture in Australia at a good profit margin.

The Manufacturer Of The Year award category recognises that for some of our clients, we also manufacture the product the product and delivered to them programmed, tested and calibrated; ready to sell.  This includes products like a DNP3 enabled power controller product for the US Smart Grid market which is made right here in Berwick as well as the Award Winning Borgtech CPL2 Corrosion Protection Data Logger with Wireless Data Logging.

It was an honour to be recognised by our city council together with other small business owners in the City Of Casey, a municipality in the outer south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne.  We will find out who the winners are on Friday 27th August at the Casey Business Awards gala dinner.

Cranbourne News 5th August 2010 Best in Business

 Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.

Australian Engineering Week 2010

Today begins Australian Engineering Week 2010.  You can get a full run down on all the events at Make It So which you might recognise as a tribute to the Star Trek series. 

It got me thinking about why I got started in Engineering.  It was music.  I had done 1 year of a Science degree focusing on Physics and Chemistry at Deakin University and had taken a year off because I had no idea why I was doing a degree.  So I worked a few mundane jobs and joined a pub band.  We were pretty bad.  I had only started playing guitar a year before that.  The equipment was low grade and needed a lot of maintenance and I was constantly trying to improve the PA, the mixer, the guitar and amplifier and the effects.  They were all analogue electronics in those days. It was mostly trial and error and occasionally trial and success!

What if I knew enough about Electronics to be able to improve, or even design from scratch, my own guitar effects pedals, guitar amplifiers, mixing desks and PA system?

But where would I learn that?  So I went back to Deakin University and asked them.  And they suggested Engineering.  I had mostly thought of Engineering as roads, buildings, bridges and transport so this was a new type of Engineering for me.  But I was also hooked.

Four years later with a First Class Honours Degree in Electrical Engineering I was doing just what I had set out to do.  Electronics Design was now a part of who I was, not just an area of study.   My rig was designed and built by me.  And I also doing electronics design and custom pro-audio equipment construction for recording studios and professional musicians.

So check out Australian Engineering Week 2010 and for some more insights into Engineering you can also read the blog at Engineering Education Australia.

Ray Keefe has been developing high quality and market leading electronics products in Australia for nearly 30 years.  For more information go to his LinkedIn profile. This post is Copyright © 2010  Successful Endeavours Pty Ltd.