Avionyx Newsletter provides valuable information for Engineering Managers, Software Engineers and Quality Engineers that develop embedded software to high quality standards such as RTCA/DO-178B. Below is a list of archived white papers and articles from previous issues that can be downloaded.

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• Vol 1 Issue 1
• Vol 1 Issue 2
• Vol 1 Issue 3

• Effort Estimation for Embedded Software Development

• Software cost estimation has been a subject of academic and practitioners research since the start of software engineering in the 1950s. Sixty years later, most companies in the domain of business applications continue to rely on expert judgment to estimate software development costs. This article provides an introduction to the subject of software estimation and how to apply some tips to the development of embedded applications.
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• Demystifying Software Coupling in Embedded Systems

• This paper clarifies common misunderstandings about the concept of software coupling for embedded software development. It explains the concepts of software coupling, and the importance of taking software coupling into consideration during the software life cycle. It provides guidelines on how to improve the project’s standards and coding practices to reduce the impact that software coupling has on the project’s complexity and delivery time.
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• Introduction to DO-178B

• This paper provides a brief introduction to DO-178B. It discusses software airworthiness and how DO-178B was created as a tool to comply with certification requirements, including an overview of the software criticality levels and the number of objectives to be satisfied for each of them. Finally, it provides an overview of the development and integral processes along with their objectives and respective software life-cycle data.
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• 7 Keys to Successful DO-178B Audits

• The FAA has established a software audit process that ensures compliance to the DO-178B objectives and other applicable software policy, guidance, and issue papers. The intent of this article is to assist you in being successful when the FAA’s Designated Engineering Representative (DER) or delegate performs an audit of your software project.
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• Using Verification Metrics in DO-178B Projects

• How high is your confidence level in estimating DO-178B verification projects? If the answer isn’t high, then maybe you need to take a close look at which metrics you are basing your estimates off of and how you are capturing them. This article offers a number of tips that can help establish a methodology to get your confidence up.
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• Unit Testing: Where does it fit in DO-178B?

• Most companies use unit testing for informal development testing, but DO-178B is geared more toward black-box requirements-based testing. With that said, where does unit testing fit in the overall verification strategy?
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• Introduction to DO-254: Design Assurance Guidance for Airborne Electronic Hardware

• Still haven’t made the time to read the RTCA/DO-254 hardware quality assurance guidelines that have been used for programmable logic in airborne systems for years now? Well here’s a quick overview that might be a little more palatable.
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• Tailoring your Project Management Methodology

• As the size of a software engineering project increases, the need for effective project management becomes more and more critical to the success of the project. There are a number of project management methodologies such as PMBOK and PRINCE2 that offer generic approaches that can be adapted to virtually any industry, company or project, but odds are none of them will be quite what you want or need right out of the box. Esteban Sánchez, Project Manager at Avionyx provides some tips on how to tailor a project management methodology that works for your company.
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• Verification Independence in DO-178B

• Level A and B projects require Independence for various activities. On the surface it might appear that you just don´t have enough people to meet all the independence requirements for every activity or the guidelines in DO-178B may seem unclear, but there are multiple ways to get independence and CAST-26 provides additional guidance.
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Business Articles and Links

• Economic Recession – Short Term Pain, But Long Term Opportunity

• This is the second recession of the decade and both of them have hit the avionics industry hard. The good news is that the lessons learned last time can help the avionics industry and other industries avoid repeating the same mistakes. But are we doomed to repeat them anyway?
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• Costa Rica: The near-shore alternative for Embedded Software Engineering

• India has nearly cornered the market on off-shore software development, but now there´s an alternative that´s in the central time zone and is a 3-5 hour flight from at least 10 US cities and offers highly trained software engineering talent that competes with any Indian provider, particularly for DO-178B or any embedded software development. To find out why Intel, HP, Avionyx and other US companies have banked on Costa Rica.
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• Costa Rica: A short flight, a great climate, and Western business practices spell good relationships.

• Thinking of outsourcing to Costa Rica? Hear how this small US software development company did it.

• Costa Rica Any Way You Want It

• Looking to do some sightseeing while in Costa Rica? This is where you need to go!

• Costa Rica ranks third worldwide in outsourcing

• How does Costa Rica stack up against other offshore destinations? A study by CIO Insight ranked Costa Rica 3rd in world in its Global Outsourcing Report