Java SE Embedded – Meaning of ‘General Purpose System’

Define what you mean by higher level stuff. Writing drivers and any other type of software that communicates with hardware is probably what most people think of when you mention embedded software. While that is part of it, that is only a small part. Once you have all that setup there is still the whole application to write that probably never actually talks to the hardware directly and more than likely in most cases this is the majority of the development effort. This can at some level be comparable to "higher" level programing. However, in the embedded world you are probably working under some constraints especially in terms of computational power and memory. Here is list of thing that I think about on daily basis that probably have less importance in higher level development in most cases.

• Thread concurrency (both protection and timing)
• Memory allocation and deallocation and usage
• Heap management (avoiding fragmentation)
• Meeting real time deadlines
• Thread prioritization
• I/0 performance
• DMA transfers
• Stack Sizes
• Library performance
• Language features (exceptions bloat your code)

Also, embedded platforms tend to be highly specialized to accomplish one specific goal opposed to a PC that is designed to be a platform for general heterogeneousness computing. This mean that you probably have a lot of custom code that may or may not be portable.

Where I work, we create embedded systems and are also using scrum for our development. You're looking at things from a technical perspective, not a feature perspective.

The first thing you should ask is "Why do we need to implement this?" For example: Why do you need SPI? Is it going to be used for EEPROM so you can store serial numbers? Or maybe hook up to a display controller so users can see items on a display? There are a lot of good reasons to create an SPI driver, but creating it just to have it isn't one of those reasons.

With Scrum you should be adopting a "We don't need it until we need it" policy, which is to say that you shouldn't waste time with SPI or wifi or anything else until there is a business need which requires those technologies to accomplish. Then that business need becomes the story.

Try "Add on EEPROM for configuration storage" instead of "Create SPI Code"

and "Create connection to server for remote management" instead of "Find documentation for WIFI and implement"