Two years ago, while the world was on the brink of a global pandemic, the global community of software developers was presented with its first (but not last) set of security regulations for IoT devices (2019 CA SB-327 & 2019 Oregon HB 2395).
While it’s the physical devices that generally excite consumers, those of us working in technology understand that it’s the software that affects the quality, security, and safety of IoT devices and other embedded software systems. Which is why you and your dev team must understand how to produce rigorous, well-engineered software systems.
The ubiquity and rapid adoption of IoT devices in our connected world (along with the low bar to entry for developing the software on which they run) means that security must be handled proactively – ideally, long before consumers meet face-to-face with any vulnerabilities.
To help teams working on embedded software produce the highest-quality solutions, The Linux Foundation Training & Certification has launched an essential, free course called Software Engineering Basics for Embedded Systems. The course provides a brief introduction to the craft and associated skills for engineering high-quality systems and software for teams that need to to create secure or safety-critical systems.
Some of the important competencies covered in this course include:
- Ability to explain the basic terminology used in software engineering.
- Understanding the basic set of skills for software engineering.
- Knowledge of processes that should be followed to avoid the systematic risks.
- Additional reference material to increase your knowledge.
- Ability to articulate the benefits of adopting good software engineering practices.
The course provides you the skills and knowledge needed to deal with the expectations that come with following an engineering process for software development. Upon completion, you will be ready to engage in meaningful discussion and analysis with existing practitioners, using appropriate concepts and terminology about engineering software.
To make the best of this course, you should have some prior software development or product integration experience, ideally in open source projects, but this course is also relevant to those with only proprietary software development experience.
This course is a guided review of essential content found in freely available external reference materials for best-practices of Software Engineering and glossary entries and informative content from standards on Systems and Software Engineering. The purpose of the course is to introduce the terminology and definitions from the reference material. To be faithful to that purpose, whenever possible the sources are quoted rather than paraphrased.This course is designed for open source developers, product managers, security professionals, safety engineers, directors and anyone who wants to develop an embedded software system to be supported over multiple lifecycles.
Course Authors
Pete Brink is a Functional Safety Engineering leader at kVA by UL and is based in Portland, Oregon. kVA is an automotive functional safety consulting company that was acquired by Underwriter Laboratories in 2019.
Gregory Shue is a Sr. Firmware/Software Engineer at Legrand, North & Central America, Inc. working on MCU-based IoT edge devices. He brings decades of embedded software development experience in Consumer, Commercial, Industrial, and Avionics domains to help address the new challenges imposed by IoT device security regulations. He lives near San Diego, CA.
Register today and learn the skills and processes needed to create a high-quality, reliable, safe, and secure embedded system.
