[munin]

> What makes you think that the engineering teams in companies like Siemens, Rockwell Automation, Mitsubishi, GE etc. are "a long way behind in terms of 'software engineering'"?

data.

http://embeddedgurus.com/barr-code/2010/09/the-sad-state-of-...

I was in a class taught by this guy and I seem to recall him saying that a large (20-40%) of embedded developers he surveyed reported using no version control software.

and look at some of the responses in that thread!

"I think that gcc -Wall -Wextra can be subtituted by lint tool (if you use gcc)."

[barik]

"I was in a class taught by this guy and I seem to recall him saying that a large (20-40%) of embedded developers he surveyed reported using no version control software."

Yeah, but that's a vendor issue; it's not that the Engineers don't want to use version control.

We'd like to, for example, but we usually can't. All of the file formats for these PLC tools are binary blobs, and since the language is usually a graphical language (ladder logic) the conventional idea of diff is pretty meaningless unless someone writes a proprietary version control to handle the binary blobs + representing ladder logic through diffs.

We still try to use it, but we lose most of the benefits. I suppose you still get a changelog, but you can't ever merge branches since merging binary blobs with binary blobs will not go well for you.

[AndrewDucker]

You get a change log, a central repository, and the ability to roll back to previous versions.

That's pretty valuable, even without the ability to merge.

[barik]

It's not really as useful as you make it out to be, since PLC code doesn't exist in isolation; there is __usually__ corresponding hardware. Unless you plan on magically "rolling back the hardware" changes as well, rolling back the software isn't all that useful in practice. Even if you can, changes are not made by any one vendor. Plant modifications happen all the time, so it's more often the case that you just end up uploading directly from the controller itself to see what the latest code is. I don't really have a good solution to that.

The exception of course is some very large companies that do everything in house.

[anamax]

> It's not really as useful as you make it out to be, since PLC code doesn't exist in isolation; there is __usually__ corresponding hardware.

You never change the SW without changing the hardware?

Wowsers. No new features and no bugs.

[joelhaasnoot]

There's a science to this, it's called "change management". How do you think Boeing manages a plane with several 1000s of engineers, hundreds of systems and everything needs to work together...

[andylei]

> a large (20-40%) of embedded developers he surveyed reported using no version control software.

that's obviously bad, but is it higher than developers across disciplines? i'm sure you guys all use version control, but if you surveyed all web devs, how many of them use version control? i'd bet its a similar number