Development Costs and Risks are determined at the project definition phase.  The success or failure of the development phase and often the commercial success of the project, and likely the commercial profitability of the product are then dependent upon the Development Manager and his or her immediate team that makes the decisions about how to proceed with the project. 

Very good companies at product development have a multi-disciplinary team that works together to do the product development.  It should include a representative from each area to make sure that all aspects of the product are considered.  For example, it should include sales, marketing, engineering, manufacturing and finance representatives.  The team leader can be from any area; however, the best choice is often the Product Marketing Manager, or the Engineering Manager.

In the MCU world, many intermediate engineers often get handed the problems of software and  with little experience in project management there is little up front understanding of Development Costs and Risks.   Often this is a first step towards disaster unless the engineer is working for an astute manager.  Better still, he is working with an asute team, that understand Lean Product Development and develop phased R&D for an evolving line of products, and they use a decision making approach like Stage-Gate to make their decisions.

The lack of experience leads to problems in estimation of the time that projects will take and risks in the approaches used.  The mentality of not invented her (NIH) is often a problem and like most engineers, they try for the 105% solution which can only be done by a green field or new development approach.  This is a big mistake because the time to market costs of such thinking are substantial and the risks of missing the window completely are also substantial.

Using Lean Product Development or platform based approaches, the errors associated with building everything in house and poor estimation are largely eliminated.  Quality make versus buy decisions and reusable platforms for both hardware and software improve estimates, reduce risk and reduce costs. 

Reusable and standardized software platforms  supporting reuse of existing components to reduce time to market, control time estimation, provide access to trained people  and reducing project risks.  All significant embedded operating systems start with POSIX and Linux compatibility today.  From the smallest MCU to a large multicore computer, all run versions of POSIX with either Linux or Linux compatible operating software.  All the benefits discussed under Lean Product Development are achieved which maximizes profits and minimizes risks. 

The make versus buy for the embedded operating system components are easy today.  There are high quality low cost POSIX and Linux variants for a range of processors from SoC MCUs through to large multicore machines.  POSIX and Linux are the defacto standards today.  Unless there is a very good technical reason, looking elsewhere is impractical.   The hundreds of thousands of dollars required to develop a good real-time kernel with documentation and testing cannot compete with an off the shelf low cost RTOS which is based on standards, documented and tested.  It saves many months in time to market.  The in house development of an RTOS or integrating an RTOS makes even less economic sense.

Some might feel that they can build a simple scheduler and that this will be the answer.  This is the solution often called a single loop of control where a big loop determines the next step of the program.  Interrupts put data in buffers and it is then processed in the big loop.   With a single event or data set to process, this works well.  With multiple events, it is far superior to use an operating system - it uses a platform based approach an is far more ameanable to upgrades and changes over time - 50% of your product engineering costs.  Consultants often recommend a use single loop of control.  With low overhead, free and very low cost POSIX solutions for virtually all embedded processors, there is no reason to take this approach today unless your application is trivial.

Develpment Costs and Risks are minimized for OEMs by using a variety of management techniques.  The control of cost and risk starts with Lean Product Development, a POSIX based embedded operating system as a platform and reusable software components.  This approach minimizes time to market and minimizes risk while maximizing profit.  Make sure that you get the right team in place with the correct thinking to control Development Costs and Risks from the first day of your product development project.