AllSpice co-founders Valentina Ratner and Kyle Dumont spoke with Luca Ingianni and Jeff Gable on their The Agile Embedded Podcast. Their conversation covered Allspice and how it is empowering collaboration for hardware engineering and electrical engineering.
Conversation highlights
Tell us about any plans that AllSpice has for improving workflows through functionality
Continuous integration (CI) will be launching soon. This tool will provide an engine for engineers to build and run tests, such as static analyses, automatically. Its integration combs through components to point out specific manufacturers. CI can even plug supply frame tools into AllSpice’s engine to decipher if those parts have supply and availability. Essentially, it leads to faster development cycles and higher-quality products.
How do you plan to keep pace and continue to interpret file formats as new versions are being released?
Using CI, AllSpice’s test files are embedded into its software stack to avoid regression when changes are being made. With this tool, the turnaround time is extremely quick.
How has your platform created the ideal hardware workflow?
Legacy hardware engineering processes had limitations surrounding the technology. An example of this is only having one engineer working on a design at a time. More efficient teamwork is an area that the co-founders sought to unlock with their highly collaborative hardware engineering development platform. Using AllSpice, engineers can easily fix an issue, put it up for a design review, and continue to work on other aspects.
Is the hardware community easily adopting Git? And in what ways is AllSpice helping with the transition?
After running polls within the hardware community about Git, AllSpice found that the majority of hardware engineers have a genuine interest in the technology and do want to use it. This could be due to the downfall of SVN plus the influence of the software industry. AllSpice has various resources that cover Git, what it is, how to use it, and how it is beneficial for hardware development and the industry as a whole. Education is done through blog posts, AllSpice’s knowledge base, and webinars.
Why is Git so much more effective than SVN?
Git encompasses a large ecosystem for AllSpice to plug into, and it is much more data-efficient. During migrations from SVN to Git, a significant amount of time is spent cleaning historical and archived files from repositories. This size of the repos causes users and companies to deal with slow latencies and overall slow work processes.
Tell us about any resistance to cloud-based tools that you have experienced
There are certain software that prefer keeping everything rather than being more cloud-based, and this can sometimes be due to lack of awareness. To combat this, AllSpice offers a dedicated server for engineering teams. For these companies that are restricted and IT conscious, AllSpice, with server management, can easily spin them up a dedicated server instance and give the IT admins control. This way, it’s safer for companies to have their data in a dedicated environment that’s run on backups.
What have you observed in changes to workflows?
An example of this is design reviews. Hardware and EE teams are able to move on from the more traditional, massive review that occurs every 3-6 months, takes weeks to organize, and hours to run. AllSpice has made these more time-efficient, where teams can hold these design reviews more frequently (multiple times a week). They are also much shorter in duration. The design review cycle on AllSpice limits the impact of issues faced.
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