This is the last in the series of newsletters that present seven principles to help guide your own processes and best practices in hardware/firmware interface design. This month’s principle focuses on the future.

People who look to the future toward retirement prepare now by putting away money. Those who are short-sighted spend their whole paycheck without any thought for the future. Businesses that plan ahead will take action today to get them to where they want to be 3 to 5 years from now. They don’t focus solely on maximizing this quarter’s results. They do have to produce good numbers for this quarter, but they don’t lose focus on the future.

Making decisions based solely on current effort and time constraints, without regard to its impact on the future, is to simply postpone corrective action until later when it will be difficult and expensive to fix.

Similarly, when designing embedded system products, look ahead and make good decisions today that will pay off in the future while not sacrificing the current product. Put a framework in the design that will allow new features and expansion to occur. Modularity, abstraction, and reuse are techniques that support planning ahead.

With respect to cell phones, the manufacturers regularly put out newer models having slightly different versions of hardware and firmware. They are able to accomplish this because they look ahead and develop a framework to support this capability.

Someone once scrawled on a white board, “There is never enough time to do it right, but there is always time to do it again.” Obviously this is not desired behavior. By taking the time now to plan ahead and do it right, you will save time and money in the future when developing your next product.

• Principle 7: Plan Ahead.

Although it will not be possible for you to memorize the best practices discussed in all these newsletters and in my book, you will find that all of them are covered by one or more of the seven principles presented in this and the six previous newsletters. In addition, you may come across situations that are not covered by a best practice that I have discussed. In this case, following the fundamental concepts of these seven principles will help you to make the right decisions.

Until my next planned newsletter…