What Tools are (Not) Critical to the Success of Engineering Projects?

 

We asked and the engineers have responded. 

 

Most Critical

 

Out of the 15 types of engineering tools we asked engineers to rate,

IP/Licensing/Compliance/Component Management tools (e.g. Black Duck Protex, Palamida, Protecode Build IP Analyzer, etc.) emerged as the highest rated tools.

 

These tools allow organizations to audit the lineage and licensing restrictions of the various open source software components they are considering integrating into their own commercial products.

 

Although these tools are used less commonly than some other types of tools we asked about, it is clear that the growing use of open source software within embedded projects is driving engineering teams to reevaluate the sources of and the ways in which they use “free” software. 

 

These tools can not only save engineers time doing this research themselves, but they can also help organizations limit software liabilities by preventing any future litigation, production line stoppages, or the “contamination” of their own proprietary software assets.

 

 

Least Critical

 

Project Management tools (e.g. Microsoft Project, Atlassian JIRA, TechExcel DevPlan, etc.) received the lowest rating for their criticality to the success of a project.

  

After seeing this result, our first reaction was the result must have been driven by the larger number of engineers versus that of project managers responding to the survey.  After further inspection, we found that project manager respondents had actually rated the tools lower than their potential subordinates!

 

So what is our take? 

 

First of all, it should be noted that Project Management tools garnered a mean score of 3.30 on a 5 point Likert scale – so they are still somewhat critical in the eyes of the engineering community at large. 

 

Secondly, we expect that you would be hard pressed to find many engineers (or project managers for that matter) that would be willing to acknowledge that a tool is/could be the key to their ability to manage their projects work - the experience levels and skill sets of the project team members (not to mention the other software development tools available to the team) are too important to the success of a project.

 

 

More information about what tools were rated and what questions we asked can be seen in our blog posting from November 30^th.

 

Stayed tuned to our blog over the coming weeks as we post more interesting findings from this research and provide more information about its general availability and packaging.