Rhapsody && Coverage Analysis

I've recently been working with a customer to integrate Wind River Coverage Analysis (formerly known as CoverageScope) with Telelogic Rhapsody within their development tools framework for a mission-critical system.

At first glance, it might seem strange to integrate a code coverage testing tool with a UML design tool, as these aren't even adjacent phases in the software development life cycle (implementation being between them). However, the advent of Eclipse in recent years has helped to break down the silos which used to confine tools individual development life cycle stages and improved development work flow.

The integration enables an application to autocode-generated from Rhapsody and built with Coverage Analysis instrumentation and downloaded and run on the target processor, with coverage results being continuously streamed back to the host and displayed in the Coverage Analysis GUI. This provides immediate feedback of of the level of coverage, and the coverage trend against time (useful for confirming if the test suite tests more and more code over time, or whether it is testing the same code over and over again).

The aspect of the integration which left the biggest impression on me though, was how it enabled the customer to confirm that the right code is executed in response to an event being injected at the UML model level. This is an important aspect of system testing, and it is often difficult to demonstrate the traceability from design to implementation. This was achieved by building the application with both Rhapsody animation and Coverage Analysis instrumentation, and then run or animated on VxWorks with events being injected from Rhapsody and the executed code was shown in Coverage Analysis.

If you're interested in seeing this for yourself, the integration steps are now documented in AppNote-344 on Wind River Online Support website (login required).

Comments

[Eric Keller]

Hi everyone,

I read your App Notes, this topic is very interesting for us... But still, I have some questions concerning the integration...

first in your "Workbench Configuration"

The integration has been used with Wind River General Purpose Platform - VxWorks Edition 3.4 (with ScopeTools 5.6)

in Rhapsody Configuration you defined:
@C:\WindRiver\scopetools5.4\...

which one should we use 5.6 or 5.4?
As we are using Industrial devices 3.4 as mentioned in the PDF, I checked for coverage.exe, in the $(WIND_HOME)/scopetools-5.6/host/bin/x86-win32

But the only .exe file is named "scope.exe"
could you please give us more informations!

the solution you are giving, combine Workbench to treat and analyze the coverage results, connecting with the target while executing the executable...

Is there a solution which would store the coverage results directly in a file, like gcov?!

Regards

[Paul Parkinson]

Hi Eric,

Thanks for your feedback. I'm glad to heard that you found the Application Note interesting.

You should use the most recent version number for the scope tools directory path that you have installed.

The fact that you are using Platform Industrial Devices - VxWorks Edition 3.4 rather than the General Purpose Platform - VxWorks Edition 3.4, should not matter, as the market-specific platforms are supersets of the general purpose platform.

However, if you don't have the Coverage Analysis executable 'coverage.exe' in your installation, it could be because that you don't have the ScopeTools Test & Validation Suite (TVS) installed. This comprises of Coverage Analysis (formerly CoverageScope) and Function Tracer (formerly TraceScope), and was an optional extension to the platforms prior to the 3.6 release, and was incorporated into the platforms in the 3.6 release.

Regards,
Paul

[Eric Keller]

Hi Paul,

thank you for your answer, I will try to install the TVS.
What's about the second part of my question, is their any chance to bring gcov to work with Windriver gnu compiler?

To my mind it would be much more adapted to our project if we could use this basic utility like under linux, the GUI brought by coverage.exe is superficial!

Regards

--
Eric