COMPONENT DESIGN
Why the electronics industry needs artifact management
Gerhard Krüger, product manager for Helix Core digital asset management at Perforce Software explores the need for artifact management
becoming increasingly complex, development teams are looking for any way possible to become more efficient and increase their velocity. As such, they are relying much more heavily on the use of software packages, also known as artifacts. Artifacts are a tangible by-
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product produced during the development of software for electronic products. These artifacts can be used by the same developers that create them, or different developers, as building blocks to produce a larger or more complex piece of software. The ability to reuse and share these pieces of code ultimately helps development teams increase their output and consistency. With how prevalent package
use is becoming, electronics organisations are looking for the best way to manage all the different artifacts their teams are consuming, creating, and sharing. Without an effective management solution multiple issues can arise. The primary issue is wasted
time. This usually occurs when developers recreate components when a suitable element already exists, which is often a side effect of the developer not being able to quickly locate the existing asset. Another common reason developers recreate a package is because the package version previously used on legacy software is no longer available. Public artifact repositories are a
ith the software involved in electronic product design
great source for finding a vast array of artifacts because anyone can submit or pull assets from them. However, they have their downsides too; public repositories can suffer from downtime, meaning that access to artifacts is not always possible. Additionally, if a developer finds a suitable artifact from a third party, can they be confident it is malware-free? If not, then they might want to carry out testing, and that takes up further time. These assets are vulnerable to cyberattack, which is why many organisations are seeking a more secure way to store, consume, and share them.
Easy and secure artifact management Fortunately, there is an answer - privately hosted artifact management tools, of which there are a growing number available to electronics software developers. The net benefit of such a tool is that all packages are stored in a central location that will adhere to an organisation’s security practices. This not only leads to increased velocity but also more secure development. When implemented effectively,
an artifact manager acts as a single source of truth, and an integration point for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline for all artifacts. By helping teams get products out to market faster, artifact managers are also a useful part of DevOps, the delivery methodology increasingly being adopted by
20 OCTOBER 2021 | ELECTRONICS TODAY
Artifact manger default
electronics design teams. However, while private artifact
management is an improvement compared to public artifact repositories, some also have their own challenges. For instance, they require additional infrastructure and software for the artifacts to be stored. While that might not sound like a big
deal, in a large electronics development environment, the geographic spread and sheer scale can mean that, rather than simplifying artifact management, these tools make the situation complex and unwieldly. We all know what that leads to - developers finding a workaround and bypassing the private
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