The useful part
It required automation skills, knowledge of controllers, experience with control logic, and considerable patience. Each new feature was the result of hours of development, verification, debugging, and continuous testing on physical prototypes. Software is no longer simply what makes a unit run: it's what makes it competitive.
How it works
- Reducing time to market has become one of the most important factors of business competitiveness, however accelerating development without compromising quality is probably the most difficult challenge to face.
- As a result, the work of software developers has also changed.
- They need to design advanced algorithms, work in multidisciplinary teams, understand increasingly sophisticated thermodynamic phenomena, and ensure that each new release maintains the same reliability...
- All this while the market is demanding increasingly faster development times.
- Virtually all HVAC equipment manufacturers are under this type of pressure.
What to take from it
Their role no longer involves just translating requirements into code. Every month a new market demand emerges, a new feature to be implemented, a regulatory update, a new refrigerant to manage, or a customer who requires a specific customisation. This is why in recent years the software development business has begun to change radically.
Details worth keeping
For many years, HVAC software development mostly meant writing code. HVAC units have become extremely complex systems. They need to optimise energy consumption, communicate with cloud platforms, adapt to increasingly stringent regulations, integrate new control strategies, and guarantee levels of cybersecurity that until a few years ago were almost exclusively in the realm of IT.
