This paper presents an overview of the software development process used at Ambric Inc., a fabless semiconductor startup company in Beaverton OR, from roughly 2006 to 2008. During that time, an agile development process was initiated and refined over the course of several major software releases, yielding significant improvements in both product quality and in reliability of release delivery dates. An analysis of the direct benefits of this approach and additional insights gained are included.rnOur team of ten software tool developers and four quality assurance engineers produced six major releases in roughly two years. In addition, a smaller application development team and their associated quality assurance engineers also used an agile approach in delivering their releases. Only the tool team's efforts will be covered in this paper. For both teams, the resulting products supported Ambric's massively parallel processor array (MPPA) chip, which allowed our customers to create and debug designs to program the chip's 344 processors and on-chip memory. Customer and internally produced applications were in the areas of video encode/decode, encryption/decryption, and image and signal processing in several domains.
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