For over 125 years, Roche has been focused on finding new medicines and diagnostics to evolve the practice of medicine and ultimately help patients live longer, better lives. That’s why we were excited when the Roche team came to us with a vision: to create a compute module that supports multiple test and experimenting environments. The module would be common for all future unique test setups, saving Roche time and money for future test designs. In speeding up development times, Roche could innovate faster and cheaper for years to come.
In short, yes! Because close collaboration is so important to how we work, we first set up a Slack channel and established weekly meetings with the Roche team. We also set up a project in Pivotal Tracker, a system we use to track features, progress, and bugs.
Next, we worked with Amanda S., an electrical engineer at Roche, to put together a comprehensive product requirements document (PRD). We established that we would be delivering one compute module PCBA with firmware, and one backplane PCBA for testing. We talked about what success for this project should look like: successful testing of the compute module and firmware.
After requirements gathering came hardware development, firmware development when the boards were sent for fabrication, then hardware testing once the boards returned. Finally, we performed firmware testing. Throughout this process, we had many technical conversations with Roche and held several technical reviews - a surprisingly uncommon but extremely useful practice in this space.
Principal Engineer: Dave Desrochers
Services: Firmware engineering, Hardware engineering, Prototyping, Testing, Project management
