Wind River Blog Network

Test Automation Meets Simulation

By Paul Henderson

I'm seeing increasing interest from many companies in using simulation environments with test automation systems to accelerate the testing process. Specifically, putting Wind River Test Management together with Wind River Simics is getting creative juices flowing in industry thought leaders.

Why? Well, development teams have started to realize the benefits of simulation systems for speeding and validating system and software design, and for accelerating software development and debug in advance of hardware availabilty. And even when hardware is available, systems like Simics provide tremendous access and control to speed analysis and diagnsotics.

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“Good” Android

By Chris Buerger

Following a recent trip to China, I acquired an Android tablet running Release 1.6 (Donut). Total retail price: $90. Unlike an iPad, it is both 'Designed and Made in China.' Running on an ARM platform and containing an 802.11 interface, SD card slot and a touch screen, it is actually a reasonably speedy experience. However, that is where the positive news ends.

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Available Now: Wind River Developer Community for Linux!

By Kay Stanley

Check this site out! http://developer.windriver.com.

Our initiative to create a resource for our Linux users to connect with others is now a reality! This project focuses on encouraging interactions between Wind River users, Wind River engineers, and embedded Linux community experts.

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Consolidate, Consolidate, Consolidate

By Mark Hermeling

Many telecom applications are actually built up from multiple smaller sub-applications, often running on their own server in a rack, ATCA or otherwise. These servers run on multi-core processors, depending on the age of the last refresh this could be a dual, quad core or more. This is of course nothing new, what's new is how virtualization can improve server utilization.

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Wind River and IBM Attack Software Quality

By Paul Henderson

As I've mentioned before, we've been working with IBM Rational for some time around quality management automation. Both companies see the skyrocketing software content and architectural complexity in the embedded device market as creating a tipping point where companies will not be able to continue with business as usual.

Product development teams will need to take a more managed and automated approach to quality that spans across the lifecycle and access into the devices under test. This is particularly true in markets that require strict adherance to standards and compliance regulations.

We put together a joint whitepaper on this subject downloadable from here. And we are also having a joint web seminar next week on Tuesday Aug 31 at 2pm EDT. You can register for this event here.

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Coming Next Week: Wind River Developer Community for Linux!

By Kay Stanley

We have been busy creating a new resource for our Linux users to connect with others! One of the most high profile and exciting initiatives that I've been tasked with, is to partner with other Wind River staff, and create a place for Linux users of all kinds to come together. We've heard what our customers have been asking for and they were the key drivers behind this project:

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Primary Virtualization Use Case

By Mark Hermeling

This topic invariably comes up when talking to customers, unfortunately, there is not just one, but several primary use cases. There are multiple ways to look into the various use cases. The one I like best is to look at generic drivers. An alternative is to look at actual usages in the various industries.

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It’s Time for Testers to Step Up

By Paul Henderson

RTC Magazine recently published an article that I wrote called "Time to Rethink Software Testing for Embedded Devices". In it I describe some of the new techniques that are possible, and I believe necessary, to delivery high quality device software for embedded devices.

• When staying 'positive' doesn't pay
• Getting negative with white box testing
• Focusing on the 'deltas' with change-based test automation

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Test Driven Development Meets Continuous Integration

By Paul Henderson

In my last posting I mentioned I'd be running a webinar with James Grenning on Agile testing. James is a recognized expert and frequent speaker on the topic of software development and one of the original authors of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

We talked about the case for agility where today's embedded software projects are inevitably faced with changing requirements and market conditions that cause unplanned, mid-course corrections. The result is what went in is often not what was expected to come out. Testing folks are the tail trying to wag the dog as they try to test in quality at the end of the project.

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Industry Investing in Better Device Runtime Visibility During Testing

By Paul Henderson

Here’s the final installment in my series about our embedded device software industry testing survey conducted in April-May 2010 with almost 900 respondents (see previous blog postings).  If you’d like a copy of the full report in pdf, please drop me an email at paul.henderson@windriver.com and I will send it to you.

In this section of the survey we asked participants about what test tools they use today and where they are investing in test automation. Given the high cost of product failure, accelerating complexity and reduced schedules the industry is turning to more test automation in 2010 to help address these problems. The top investment are moving to new tools that can help test teams and their management better understand how well they are testing, better focus their efforts on the areas needing testing, and reduce cycle time through more automation.

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The High Cost of Poor Quality – Brand, Market, Budget

By Paul Henderson

I’m continuing my series on our embedded device industry software testing survey conducted in April-May 2010 with almost 900 respondents (see previous blog posting).  If you’d like a copy of the full report in pdf, please drop me an email at paul.henderson@windriver.com and I will send it to you.

In this section of the survey we asked participants about how they measure the high cost of poor quality. Respondents told us that the true cost of poor quality is much higher than program budget. The majority of respondents showed that the true cost of poor quality is measure by damage to company brand and lost revenue due to missed market windows.

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Inadequate Management Visibility into Quality is Eroding Confidence

By Paul Henderson

Here’s the next installment in my series on our embedded device software industry testing survey conducted in April-May 2010 with almost 900 respondents (see previous blog postings).  If you’d like a copy of the full report in pdf, please drop me an email at paul.henderson@windriver.com and I will send it to you.

In this section of the survey we asked participants about how they measure software quality today, the metrics most often cited by survey respondents were reactive in nature such as tracking customer-reported failures and open defects rather than metrics that can help them prevent defects.

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Compressed Schedules Driving Shorter Testing & Defect Resolution Requirements

By Paul Henderson

Today I'm continuing my series on our embedded device software industry testing survey conducted in April-May 2010 with almost 900 respondents (see previous blog posting).  If you’d like a copy of the full report in pdf, please drop me an email at paul.henderson@windriver.comand I will send it to you.

In part 2 of the survey we asked about schedule compression and what affect that was having on the device testing cycle. A majority of survey participants reported that market conditions have forced them to shorten their development schedules by as much as 18 months.

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A Crisis of Complexity – Industry Report on Growing Challenges in Embedded Testing

By Paul Henderson

I’ve been talking a lot with embedded device companies around the world over the last few years and I am hearing growing concerns about software testing. I’ve mentioned several of these concerns in previous blogs. I wanted to get more quantifiable data and get some feedback that could help us shape our products and services to help. So I decided to run a survey to gather important data from our community.

The focus of this survey was to gain a detailed snapshot of how executives, development managers, QA and test team leaders and other involved staff currently view the embedded device software quality test landscape. Recent changes, new challenges and strategies for managing them were of particular interest.  So I fielded a four-part survey to individuals who work for embedded products companies. In total, nearly 35,000 individuals in North America were invited to participate in the survey via emails. 

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The ‘Big Reveal’ Release Approach in Mobile Linux – How Android and MeeGo Differ

By Chris Buerger

A couple of weeks ago, I read through a somewhat heated email thread about the ‘Big Reveal’ mentality that Intel and Nokia were claimed to apply to the pending MeeGo 1.0 release. By coincidence, the timing overlapped with the excitement Google was stirring up for its 2.2 (Froyo) release of Android. Both events made me wonder about the value of a ‘big reveal’ approach in mobile open source stacks, and whether there might not be developments that occur within rapidly maturing software stacks that are native and systemic to the open source model, and that at the same time change the potential impact of ‘Big Reveal’ releases of either Android or MeeGo.

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What’s New in Wind River Test Management 3.3?

By Paul Henderson

Today we announced the latest version of Wind River Test Management, Release 3.3, our test automation system for monitoring, executing and managing embedded device software testing. Wind River Test Management lets teams optimally execute complex tests while dynamically gathering information from the production software under test as it is running, without requiring special pre-instrumented software builds. This approach allows teams to adopt new white-box test techniques that give testers visibility into the operation of the device and help them determine the thoroughness of the tests, quickly identify defects and performance bottlenecks, and focus efforts on sections of software that are most in need of testing.

Release 3.3 is a major new release that adds a number of significant new features. You can learn more and download several new whitepapers from www.windriver.com/products/test_management.

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Wind River @ IBM Rational Innovate 2010

By Paul Henderson

Today marked the opening of the annual IBM Rational Software developer conference, this year called Innovate 2010, here in Orlando Florida.

The 4 day event is covering a range of topics on both IT and embedded systems software development and test lifecycle tools and technologies. Wind River has a presence on the exhibit floor and a number of conference tracks. The mood is very positive at this 13th conference. 4000 attendees are here, a 20% growth over 2009.

The show opened with several IBM executives led by Dr. Danny Sabbah, GM IBM Rational Software reviewing IBM's "Smarter Planet" strategy including "systems and software econometrics". Dr. Sabbah described how software innovations are now driving the world, particularly as related to intelligent products and services.  

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Time to Get Positive about Negative Testing

By Paul Henderson

I spend a lot of time talking to device development and test groups and I continue to be surprised by a number of things. One is how little test automation is in place if you look across embedded device companies and industries.

But another surprise is how little companies are doing in the way of “negative” testing. By this I mean testing that tries to break the system, validate fault and exception handlers or otherwise force the device in to an unusual state or “edge condition”.

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Community Survey: Device Software Testing and Your Changing Requirements

By Paul Henderson

If you’re like me, you’re amazed at the pace of change occurring in the embedded industry. Our corner of the technology world is racing through changes – in platforms, functionality, development approaches and business requirements – faster than ever. 

From a product management standpoint, it’s a challenge to stay on top of these new developments, and how their impact varies from one industry to the next. We must understand how these changes are playing out in your shop, and how they are impacting you and your teams.

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Hypervisors in Mobile

By Mark Hermeling

I received a bunch of emails today pointing to this blog from Jason Perlow. Jason has an interesting thought with regards to the Apple and HTC lawsuit that is brewing. Let me first say that I understand that companies have to protect their IP and that there are clearly important and enforceable patents out there, say Coca Cola's formula for well, Coca Cola. Apple certainly has a lot of valuable IP as well and they are spending a lot of dollars in making the user experience better. Some of these patents are vague at best, so I have mixed feelings on this and since I am not a lawyer I am going to leave it at that.

Jason's blog evolves around hypervisors and his fantasy world in which they can change the way we build mobile phones. This is not a fantasy world, in the fact that what Jason wants is technically very possible. However, it would also require alliances between some of the fiercest competitors in one of the biggest markets in the world. Unlikely to happen, however, allow me to dream with him.

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A Sea of Cores, Now What?

By Mark Hermeling

A great number of cores gives more processing power, but this power needs to be harnessed. The easiest way to control a sea of cores is of course to run a single operating system over this sea in a Symmetric MultiProcessing mode (SMP). Most modern operating systems support this (which includes Wind River Linux and VxWorks of course).

The trick is to minimize the impact of Amdahl's law. This law describes the maximum theoretically attainable speedup on your multicore processor. Given a N core multicore processor, one would expect an application to run N times as fast, at least ideally.

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The Beauty Of Partitioning

By Mark Hermeling

Developing for multicore often asks for new approaches to architecting embedded systems. A low-core-count multicore processor, say a 2 or 4 core processor, could be configured to use a single operating system in a SMP configuration.

This would give one single OS control over both cores and is often a valid configuation. The OS should have features such as core affinity and core reservation. The former will lock a process to a core, but will allow other processes to use the core as well, the latter reserves a core for the exclusive use of a single process.

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2010 Is The Year Of Embedded Virtualization

By Mark Hermeling

I believe that 2010 will be the year of embedded virtualization, all the signs point in the right direction. It always takes a while for new technology to grab the imagination of embedded device developers.

Embedded developers are traditionally a conservative bunch, however, the benefits of virtualization can not be ignored, even by them.

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How Industry Software Expertise is Helping to Solve the Android Fragmentation Dilemma

By Jason Whitmire

It is no secret:  While Google continues to push for wide adoption of smartphones driven by its open source Android platform, most industry pundits know that manufacturers typically need upwards of a full year of development and productization effort (and often Google’s help) to develop an Android phone. Not surprisingly, it takes much longer for an OEM to reach a level where they can irrigate the operator ecosystem with differentiated phones based on Android (this of course applies to most new mobile device software stacks).

At the same time, we are all aware that there are multiple parallel efforts to enhance Android that have led many observers to believe that fragmentation is inevitable. Ultimately, it is said, this will become the bane to developers who will struggle to reach an economy of scale on a moving target where multiple variants of the Android OS co-exist.

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Article: Multi-Core Slow Down

By Mark Hermeling

An interesting article by Dan Woods on Multi-core slowdown. The article tries to temper people's expectations with regards to mArticle: Multi-Core Slow Downulticore. The basic argument goes: A multicore processor has more raw processing power, but it requires the software load that runs on top of that processor to be able to use those cores, if not, the software could run at the same speed as single-core, or even slower.

One of the ways to use all the cores of course is multi-threaded programming in combination with an SMP operating system that can schedule over all the cores (SMP being Symmetric Multi Processing). Typically multi-threaded programs use multiple threads of execution and use synchronization primitives to make sure executions happens in the right order.

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M2M, the Buzzword

By Nikhil Chauhan

The one I am referring to is an abbreviation of Machine to Machine.

It's simply a communication mechanism between machines or devices. The communication is done with minimal or no human intervention, hence the term machine. If interested, Wikipedia has a much more elaborate definition here.

M2M is getting a lot of traction within the connected device community because it touches many industry verticals spanning from industrial, consumer, energy, automotive and medical to name a few.

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Primary Multicore Software Configurations

By Mark Hermeling

Many people ask the question as to what the best approach would be for them to go to multicore and/or virtualization. This is a great question to start a discussion as there is not a single silver bullet.

I meant to post a quick diagram on the different multicore configurations before, but life has been busy since we announced the Wind River Hypervisor earlier this year. Busy in this case is certainly a good thing.

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Wind River’s Next Chapter

By Ken Klein

It’s been roughly 90 days since Wind River became a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel, and I wanted to take this opportunity to share with you the state of our business and a few personal thoughts of mine in what marks my inaugural contribution to the Wind River Blog Network.

Let me begin by saying what an exciting road it has been. This has been one of the most frenetic years in recent memory. Just last month I returned from visits to many of our offices in North America, Europe and Asia. During those visits I was reassured that our employees understand and embrace the Intel acquisition. Of course, there were lots of questions and luckily I had answers to most of them. Personally, I’m ecstatic with the transition to Intel’s Software and Services Group. We closed the acquisition in near record time, in just six weeks, allowing us to avoid distraction. Since then, we’ve made significant progress in identifying alignment opportunities, and establishing clear rules of engagement and business metrics.

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Commercial Open-Source; An Oxymoron?

By Nithya Ruff

The dictionary describes Oxymorons as "literary figures of speech usually composed of a pair of neighboring contradictory words (often within a sentence) or a combination of contradictory or incongruous words".

Perhaps some view commercialization of open source as contradictory. Where does it say that paying for good value is wrong or having a strong and commercially viable entity support the use and practice of open source is bad. Exactly, almost like motherhood and apple pie. Open Source, like art has long had a history of benefactors, sponsors and champions. Companies who gave back because they use open source. Companies who champion open source maintainers by having them on the payroll and giving them the freedom to do what they do best. Companies and commercial entities find many ways of giving back.

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OpenSAF 3.0 released

By Hans Juergen Rauscher

Last week OpenSAF released its 3.0 version of the high-availability framework.

This release is the second (counting from v2.0 onwards) during its lifetime, took about 1.5 years and shows the strong and continuing support from contributors such as Wind River Systems, Inc.

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