Aero
space
Maintaining mission-critical safety leaves no room for error in Aerospace. And its engineers have a risk tolerance of zero. The old adage of 'break things and move fast.' certainly did not apply to an aerospace hardware development team. they knew that their fellow engineers were looking for a better way to ensure every design aspect was tested, verified, and secured.
The challenges
l Limitations in the tech stack options to utilize due to ITAR compliance and
other security requirements.
l PCB and schematic designs lacking proper version control and visibility across
colleagues and other disciplines.
l The dissemination of documentation went through a patchwork of channels,
including slack, email, and in-person meetings.
l Ramping up new employees was time-consuming and increased the risk of
being prone to errors.
The solution
Hardware and Electrical engineers found a way to leverage a wealth of documentation by building a process around it that's well adopted and understood across multiple types of engineering teams. By applying Git to their hardware development process, the aerospace firm could take advantage of how intuitive it was. Many engineers within the organization were already utilizing Git part-time on the side, and others used it while working with their software counterparts.
The wealth of information available on git allowed their team to easily address varying comfort levels across their teams and find answers to any git-related questions. The Git community provided the resources that made it possible to apply these principles to hardware.
l Collaborative features like redlining,
commenting, and permissions provided more
accountability and quicker issue resolution.
l Design reviews are now run like pull requests.
l Their repositories are created and reviewed with
templates and checklists.
l Inline comments help drill down issues in PCBs
or schematics.
The results
"These asynchronous design reviews allow us to get our designs into production faster, accelerating our launch times (figuratively and literally!)
- Electrical Engineer
"The friction we reduced through automated PCB, schematics, and BOM redlines is what piqued our initial interest in AllSpice. The ease in which our team piloted the hub made adding AllSpice to our engineers' workflow a no-brainer."
- Hardware Engineer
l Design reviews no longer had to be solely run in person with shared
availability; they are now done on everyone's own time, with deadlines
clearly defined.
l Silos were broken down that had previously existed between
Hardware, Firmware, and Software teams, creating better cross-
departmental communication.
l Improved version control decreased errors earlier on during the design
review process.
l Time savings of having a centralized channel for documentation review
eliminated a lot of administrative tasks for their engineers.
Additional benefits
"We were previously utilizing on-prem hosting. In working with the AllSpice team, we determined that moving to GovCloud checked all the boxes. We were able to maintain all of the security benefits of on-prem and remain ITAR compliant but no longer had to manage it ourselves. AllSpice guiding us through this migration made it seamless and led us to choose a hosting service that gives us the best of both worlds!"