Published: Mar 11, 2026 by Dominik Berner
Shipping software for embedded devices has traditionally meant long release cycles, risky upgrades and “Big Bang” releases. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Being able to ship updates to your devices faster and more reliably can be a game-changer for your business. It means being able to ship earlier, respond to customer feedback more quickly, and fix bugs on the fly. When shipping software becomes a routine and safe, teams can focus on delivering value instead of managing risky releases. Moving from a few releases every odd year to a few releases every month will be a game-changer and it is not as hard as you might think.
Big releases are a big risk
In many embedded software projects, releases are rare and stressful events. They often involve a lot of manual work, coordination between teams, and a high risk of things going wrong. The alternative is to make releases small, frequent and boring. Instead of bundling months of development into a single firmware version, deliver incremental improvements continuously. Each change should be small enough that its impact is well understood and reversible.
When releases are small and routine, the feedback loop with customers becomes much shorter and product development becomes more agile. While embedded software probably never will be able to ship as fast as pure software products, there are still many ways to speed up the delivery process and make it more reliable. However, moving from multiple months between releases to a few weeks or even days can have a huge impact on your product and your customers. It allows you to respond to customer feedback more quickly, fix bugs faster, and deliver new features sooner.
Making Releases Routine
To enable faster releases for embedded devices, you need to invest in a few key capabilities that reinforce each other. Some of these are technical foundations, others are organizational habits or cultural shifts, but most can be introduced incrementally without turning the whole company upside down. The goal is to make releasing feel like just another part of everyday development work rather than a nerve‑wracking special event.
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The first step is to treat releases as a routine, not a ceremony. If you ship only once or twice a year, every release feels exceptional, with custom scripts, ad‑hoc decisions and lots of manual coordination. This naturally increases risk, because nobody gets enough practice to truly master the process. By contrast, when releases happen regularly, the team gains muscle memory. You can get there by deliberately increasing the frequency of internal releases first: ship every sprint to a staging environment, then to a small set of internal devices, and only then to customers. Over time, the release pipeline becomes so familiar that pushing a new version out is as unremarkable as merging a pull request.
Shifting the attitude inside the team towards releases is one thing, but to go to full power you also need the technical capabilities to deliver the releases. Over‑The‑Air (OTA) updates are the technical backbone that makes this routine possible at scale. Without a solid OTA mechanism, delivering embedded software means physical access to devices, manual interventions, or complex field procedures. This makes releases cumbersome and risky. A robust OTA solution lets you update devices in the field reliably, with support for progressive rollouts, version tracking and rollbacks. There are many mature OTA-solutions out there, and most can be conveniently integrated with your build system and CI/CD pipeline. With OTA in place, you can decouple the release process from physical logistics and manual steps. The outcome is that “shipping” becomes an automated action triggered from your pipeline rather than a logistical project involving manual coordination.
The ability to update devices in the field is a big enabler, but to profit the most from it automating the delivery pipeline is a must. Automated testing via a powerful CI/CD pipeline is what turns frequent updates from reckless to safe. If every change can be built, tested and validated automatically, then the risk of each individual release drops dramatically. The testing possibility and complexity for embedded software is often huge, but even automating a subset of tests can have a big impact on confidence. Build up an efficient and automated testing pipeline that covers the critical paths of your software. Start by putting the entire build under CI so that every commit produces a reproducible artifact. Then layer on unit tests, static analysis, and hardware‑in‑the‑loop or end‑to‑end tests where feasible. Over time, your pipeline becomes a safety net: if something slips through, the pipeline catches it before customers ever see it. This confidence is what allows you to ship more often without losing sleep.
Finally, shipping faster requires shifting product management away from chasing big, “heroic” releases and towards delivering features continuously. Large, monolithic releases encourage long planning cycles, heavy upfront design and a tendency to cram in “just one more feature” which delays getting real feedback. Shift from delivering major versions that “make everying better” to delivering single features or small improvements that can be released independently. Product managers play a crucial role here by setting expectations with stakeholders about incremental releases, and measuring success by customer impact rather than marketing the next big release “that makes everything better”. You can support this shift by aligning roadmaps with short delivery cadences, encouraging experimentation, and using metrics such as lead time and value delivered instead of just counting features.
When you combine these four elements - releases as routine, OTA as plumbing, automated testing as your safety net and product management focused on incremental value - you create a delivery system that is both faster and more resilient. Releases stop being terrifying, once‑in‑a‑while events and become a steady, predictable flow of improvements. That, in turn, lets your teams spend less time orchestrating risky upgrades and more time building products your customers actually care about.
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