Embedded firmware and software engineers are a special breed.
Many of us have our roots in the hardware side of the product. Therefore, right off the bat, we are comfortable wearing multiple hats. We bring the lunchpail and DIY mentality to the team. “Yeah, sure, I can do that.” After all, software is just typing.
And that exact mentality and skill set often help make the team successful. At least at the beginning of the project and the company’s startup phase.
We often praise the brilliance of the individual engineers. The wizard who can make a microcontroller sing. The one who remembers every register name by heart. The developer who writes both the UART driver and the YAML code for the CI pipeline.
But if you zoom out and you look not at the engineer but at the system of engineers, you’ll find that sustained performance and scaling don’t come from individual genius.
They come from how the team works.
High-performance embedded engineering teams that successfully scale their product and company share a set of characteristics. Habits, mindsets, tools, and workflows that enable them to repeatedly ship complex, quality software that works, on real hardware, in the real world.
Let’s unpack what those teams have in common.
They’ve Conquered the Chaos
High-performance teams don’t operate in chaos. They likely started there (and that’s OK and probably necessary), but they don’t stay there. Not past the initial stages, anyway. Chaos is the enemy of scale and velocity.
The embedded world is uniquely chaotic. Discontinuous delivery. Toolchain fragmentation. Scarce and messy hardware. Compliance landmines and 3rd party regulatory testing. Everyone’s developing on their own laptop with their own makefile quirks and debug scripts from five years ago.
But the best teams know when and how to confront that chaos and tame it. They commit to tools and people who can help them (even hiring specialists). They create consistency across build environments. They stop hacking together YAML, spreadsheets, and Jira to track releases. They build configuration management into their daily process, so every build is reproducible in seconds, every delivery is auditable, and every engineer can develop with confidence.
They Test All Day, Every day, and Automatically on Real Hardware
Here’s the truth: if you’re testing on the hardware manually only after releasing, you’re just firefighting and paying a huge tax on each release.
The best teams push testing left into every stage of development. This is not news. This is what the web and mobile product teams do as a matter of course. They showed the way, and it’s the yellow-brick road that leads to Oz.
The farther to the right the bug is found, the more expensive and time-consuming it is to fix it. If it gets to the field and into a customer’s hand, it might be infinitely expensive to fix.
But for embedded teams, testing must include real hardware. Yes, simulation and emulation environments can be (and often should be) built and used for early-stage or hardware/software codevelopment. And newer sim technologies, such as Renode and Qemu, make simulation more accessible, but still, your custom hardware is what the real world gets.
Great teams figure out how to automate Hardware-in-the-Loop testing. That includes every pull request and merges to the main branch, and also time-based triggers such as nightly and weekly.
Automating HiL testing is usually a custom, DIY exercise. Hardware is messy, finicky, finite, and lives in geographic space. How does one do it and make it reliable, fast, and trustworthy? You commit to tools and people who can help. They design and build frameworks, consistent environments, and infrastructure like they do their product. Then they reuse and scale it.
Testing is not a phase. It’s a culture.
They Treat Traceability and Configuration Management as a Feature
Most teams treat traceability and configuration management as a manual chore or a regulatory checkbox. The best teams know it’s actually a superpower.
Want to know what version of firmware with what tuning parameters was shipped to Customer B six months ago? Need to recreate that exact build to patch a certification-blocking bug without disrupting the rest of the system? What about knowing and being able to recreate the pre-sales demo firmware that an FAE shared with a potential customer three months ago?
If you can’t answer those questions in under a minute, you don’t have traceability. You have wasted time and effort.
High-performance teams implement automated systems that embed ephemeral configuration management into each and every build. Tools, team, and workflow.
Traceability isn’t just for compliance. It’s for sales. It’s for debugging. It’s for velocity.
They’ve Embraced Professional Grade DevOps
Web and mobile figured out DevOps a decade ago. A whole industry full of standardized tools to support CI/CD, test automation, cloud builds, and deployment has been instantiated almost out of thin air (for the web).
But embedded has lagged behind. The platforms and tools aren’t built for the specific needs of embedded development. Every underperforming embedded team has a graveyard of homegrown scripts. They built their own test runner. Their own packaging tool. Their own delivery tracker. And now they’re stuck maintaining it.
The best teams, however, are using DevOps. They’ve realized a few important things about how to make it successful:
- They hire the team and bring in the tools to build it right. “Hello, world!” is easy. Production-worthy is difficult. They keep the top product engineers working on the product.
- Pushing CI and the other DevOps implementations onto the development and test engineers themselves just slows them down, creates wasted costs, and puts releases in jeopardy.
- Configuration management is more than just the git commit ID.
- Test on the hardware. All day. Every day.
Professional DevOps for embedded isn’t a trend. It’s a survival strategy. It’s what will push your team over the hump.
They Build a Culture of Shared Responsibility
The best teams don’t throw code over the wall to QA or system test. They don’t say, “My stuff works, must be the hardware.” They know that delivering reliable embedded systems is a shared responsibility. It’s all hands on deck.
These teams blur the lines between development, testing, and release. Everyone builds. Everyone tests. Everyone can answer: “What did we ship? To who? And can we recreate it?”
They know that an embedded team and a successful embedded product is more than just adding the software to the hardware. It’s not 1+1=2. If they work the right way, it’s 1+1=10.
It’s Not Just What You Build — It’s How
We glamorize the product. Of course, we do. It’s the purpose. The robot. The satellite. The device next to the hospital bed.
But what separates the great embedded teams from the rest isn’t just the usefulness of the end product. It’s the system they use to build, test, and deliver that product. Over and over, under pressure, on schedule.
If you’re stuck in the chaos — build inconsistencies, manual testing, delayed releases, config nightmares — you’re not alone. But the great teams have shown us the way forward. They build process like it’s a product. They automate what hurts. They trace everything. They embrace DevOps.
And they make the hard stuff repeatable.
Want to be a high-performance team?
Don’t just ship great code.
Build, test, and release it the smart way.
