Industry Expert Blogs

Engineers learn the hard way why it’s critical to communicate when a major requirement gets missed

It was the big day for the Software Team – they were scheduled to demonstrate their latest and greatest rendition of their SNMP network management software package to the Marketing Team. Months of intensive sweat-and-blood software design was about to be judged. The new hardware was… well, just hardware.

Our new prototype hardware was set up in the lab and was fully debugged, transmitting all the test traffic packets between multiport network hubs without error. This was a bit of a problem because the Software Team wanted to demonstrate how their Management Information Base (MIB) could tally and report all sorts of transmission anomalies – runt packets, CRC errored packets, collided packets, discombobulated packets – whatever. Unfortunately the Hardware Team had done its job superbly so there were no damaged packets to tally during the demonstration.

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