The Global Chip Shortage — Quality Engineering & other Solutions
Since the global pandemic that triggered the global semiconductor chip shortage, there have been very minimal signs of improvement. As a result, there is prevalent fear across the industry spectrum that 2022 will be the same.
Numerous factors contributed to this shortage, ranging from political to public health. Unfortunately, none of these factors are being addressed even today. So, there is a high probability that the supply side constraints will continue to persist, impacting every industry on this planet.
Businesses are already cutting down on their production capacity, which is directly proportional to their revenue numbers in the coming year. So, it is high time that companies acutely affected by this chip deficiency adopt new remedies to overcome this crisis.
Experts have suggested numerous solutions, but not all of them are feasible. Moreover, this crisis is one-of-a-kind. So, traditional solutions of managing and modifying supply chains cannot be economically viable for everyone.
Here are some probable and economically viable solutions to help businesses tackle the situation:
Policy approach: increasing domestic production
Most countries have limited capacity to meet the domestic chip demand and are forced to import semiconductor chips. As a consequence of the pandemic-induced semiconductor scarcity, their economic security is held on ransom.
Even corporates biggies, including Apple, have faced the brunt of this great chip famine and had to postpone their much-hyped iPhone 12 by two months.
So, it becomes necessary for governments affected by this situation to take some necessary policy-level actions. In fact, America and EU, which are also largely impacted by this situation, have formulated laws — CHIPS for America Act & European Chips Act, respectively.
Both these laws are centered around investing and boosting the domestic semiconductor manufacturing market in their respective countries and regions. As a result, these laws will help businesses in these countries build domestic semiconductor capacity to meet their technology demand.
In addition, such policy-level actions will ensure that any similar crisis in the future will not impact these countries at this scale.
However, it is also important to consider the fact that policy-level strategies are long-term. The length of this duration is often dependent on political, social and economic factors. So, businesses cannot rely on this approach alone. Without a short-term solution, it would be difficult to sustain in the near future.
Quick fix approach: shift to a different microcontroller
Different semiconductor companies make numerous microcontrollers — devices that have tiny computers on a single metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) integrated circuit (IC) chip. These chips are the lifeline for Smart devices.
Usually, when chips are selected, the primary criterion is the cost. However, with the chip shortages plaguing the industry, businesses will also need to look towards costlier alternatives.
Now, choosing alternatives and integrating these chips into the system may seem straightforward, but it’s not. There are compatibility issues with the software in most cases. So, the alternate chip options often have to go through a corresponding modification process.
However, the biggest challenge — validating whether the engineering teams can replicate this new arrangement on a mass scale — still persists. This is where quality engineering teams (design & testing) come into the picture.
Let us understand this with the help of the following steps:
1. Hardware and software engineers obtain a sustainable microcontroller alternative.
2. The hardware specialists validate if the new microcontroller is “pin compatible” with the current Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs).
3. The software experts migrate the code to a new microcontroller.
4. Quality engineers conduct regression testing on the software upgrade to ascertain if all the features are functioning correctly.
5. The development team then fixes the issues detected during the regression testing.
6. Subsequently, DevOps teams run multiple sprint cycles of testing and subsequent fixes.
7. Quality engineering teams then sign off the software as ready-to-use on a mass scale.
But again, this is a band-aid solution and can only tackle a part of the problem.
The swiftness and efficiency of switching to a different microcontroller usually rely on the portability of the device’s software.
So, it’s a fact that no matter what we do, the large-scale scarcity of these tiny yet critical microelectronics is not going to go away soon. Even if some industries manage to circumvent it, it won’t be a long-term solution.
So, there is an urgent need to act today to avert such precarious situations in the future.
A long-term policy-level solution can take care of the supply-chain problems, but companies cannot rely on just one policy-based long-term solution.
Businesses always prefer a technological solution!
Here are some long-term technological solutions for industries to start acting upon from today.
Quality engineering approach: software portability
As already discussed, the above-mentioned short-term solution works best with portable software. So, businesses must have a high degree of software portability in their systems. However, this level of portability requires investment in quality engineering processes and the enablement of technical practices to ensure high-quality, portable coding, right from the onset of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC).
You can achieve all of these by:
· Investing in conceptual integrity — With conceptual integrity, the code becomes more habitable than usual, easily maintainable and naturally scalable.
· Starting Test-Driven Development (TTD) — With TTD, quality engineering teams follow the first-test approach to development, including writing unit tests before coding.
· Embedding test automation with Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) — This combination reduces the testing time and enables thorough testing on features requiring human-readable specifications.
Here, investing does not necessarily mean scaling testing operations. In cases where businesses do not have the core competencies of quality engineering frameworks, they can always outsource the quality-related process to quality engineering firms such as Qualitest.
Being an industry leader in the field of quality engineering and digital assurance, Qualitest is well-equipped to handle all issues pertaining to software quality and performance.
Key takeaways
Given the current situation, organizations know they must look for solutions — whether it’s long term, short-term, policy-based or engineering-based. There is nothing much for businesses to act upon in policy-based solutions, especially in the initial stages as the government drives them.
However, other solutions mentioned here can allow businesses to get an upper hand on the present situation.
