Paul Parkinson

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).

scitopia supersearch

Sometimes when I am writing technical papers and articles I want to check whether there are any recent scholarly articles on the topic. The easiest (or perhaps that should be laziest?) thing to do of course is to use Google web search, but this often returns an exhaustive list of results, it's often quite hard to find articles amongst the vast number of results. Fortunately, as my wife is a librarian, she has been able to point me in the right direction - both Google Scholar and British Library Direct being sources which I have found useful.   

However, I've just been alerted to a new resource called scitopia.org which is a free search tool that lets users find newly published research almost immediately and enables easy searching of multiple sites with one search request. Scitopia.org offers users a federated vertical search service to retrieve the content provided by its partner scholarly societies, including recently published articles as well as digitized content that goes back as far as 1884.

scitopia searches more than three million documents, including peer-reviewed journal content, conference proceedings and patents. The fifteen science and technology publishers involved include several of particular interest to me: the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the American Institute of Physics (AIP), the American Physical Society (APS), IEEE, Institute of Physics Publishing (IOP) and SPIE.

For example, searching for active sonar cancellation (which I discussed in my previous blog) returns 197000 results in Google Web search and 2200 results in Google Scholar. scitopia returns 25 society documents and 27 government documents which are easier to browse and more likely to be relevant.

I’ve blogged previously about alerting services that I use, so its good to see that a number of the scitiopia partners offer free alerting on new issues or articles via RSS feed or email through the site.

Free access to JACIC

I’ve just found out that the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) is offering access to the entire content of the Journal of Aerospace Computing, Information, and Communication (JACIC) for two weeks for free! Yes, really.

To access the full text, you need to browse the Journal Table of Contents (on the left of the main page), the click the JACIC tab. This will enable you to select papers by volume and year from drop-down menus, and you can select the full text of the paper of interest in Adobe PDF by clicking on its title.  You don't even need to register.

(Note: If you just click on a paper title on the homepage, you only get the first page of an article).

I've just downloaded some interesting papers from 2007 Volume 4 Issue 5 on UAVs (miniature UAVs, autonomous UAV, intelligent flight control, swarming, etc.) This will give me something interesting to read while I am waiting around airports next week.

Better be quick though, because the free offer expires on 27th May.

Keeping current with A&D conferences

I seem to receive so much email these days, much of it spam and junk (wikipedia), that sometimes I miss information that I want to receive.

Also, some of my email volume is self-inflicted, due to my somewhat over zealous use of Google Alerts for keeping track of developments in areas of aerospace which are of interest to me; and the Jane's News Briefs which keep me up to date on important news.

So, I was pleased when I stumbled across ConferenceBrief, which provides a consolidated list of forthcoming conferences and events within aerospace and defence, which can be browsed at a glance. The free service is part of AERADE, a portal which provides integrated access to a collection of key aerospace and defence resources that can be browsed or searched independently.

This should save me some time which I can use to tackle the rest of my Inbox...