Improving Continuous Practices in System-on-Chip Development

Abstract

This work is about continuous practices in embedded System-on-Chip development. Continuous practices include continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous development. These practices mean committing small code changes often to the repository’s main branch. Then the changes are automatically tested and integrated with the rest of the system. In the case of continuous deployment, all the changes are automatically deployed to production without any human interaction. Continuous practices are meant to make development faster and more effective, give feedback faster and improve quality by reducing bugs. These tasks are important in today’s industry which is continuously changing, and customer satisfaction is as important as ever. This creates the demand to deliver new products and updates rapidly along with high quality. In the Nokia Networks’ System-on-Chip department there was a need to increase the level of automated processes by improving the continuous practices. This work studies continuous practices based on literature and identifies ways to improve continuous practice processes used at System-on-Chip development. The implementation of this work was done at the System-on-Chip departments’ software unit where the current state was analysed. The main improvement points found in the analysis were related to automated function, investment and working habits. Based on the analysis the implementation plan was formed. The implementation included adding more functions to the continuous integration server, improving feedback and making the results more visible. These were done by creating more Jenkins jobs and integrating Robot Framework to the testing. All the improvements were not possible to do within the time scope or without the support of the whole department. Therefore, those problem points were analysed, and detailed plans were formed to solve them in the near future.