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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Transporting Bugs with Checkpoints

By Jakob Engblom

I have a paper about "Transporting Bugs with Checkpoints" to be presented at the S4D (System, Software, SoC and Silicon Debug) conference in Southampton, UK, on September 15 and 16, 2010. The core concept presented is to leverage Wind River Simics checkpointing to capture and move a bug from the bug reporter to the responsible developer. It is a fairly simple idea, but getting it to work efficiently does require that some things are done right.

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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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VxWorks in Education: University of São Paulo, Brazil - Part 2

By Bill Graham

In part two of my interview with Professor Glauco Caurin, we talk about some the research projects that they working on and how they are using VxWorks and other Wind River products:

Q: Tell us about the research projects you have make use of Wind River Products. Can you give us more detail on the Kanguera, the five fingers robot hand? Which of our software are you using? Where is it used and why?

We are using VxWorks now for some years with different platforms. More then 8 years ago we started the first research projects with the hardware funded by FAPESP using VxWorks donated by Wind River as the RTOS. The projects were related to the development of robot grippers and hands.

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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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VxWorks in Education: University of São Paulo, Brazil - Part 1

By Bill Graham

Wind River regularly contributes to education programs across the globe. One of these institutions is the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil. They are doing some amazing things with VxWorks and Wind River products play a big role in research and education in their engineering programs. In the next few posts I have transcribed an interview with Professor Glauco Caurin who teaches in robotics, mechatronics and mechanical engineering at USP's São Carlos Engineering School:

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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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When is Scripting really Programming?

By Jakob Engblom

I recently updated some analysis scripts in Simics to use the new OS awareness framework in Simics 4.4. While doing so, I completely updated the structure of the code, ending up with something looking suspiciously like a regular Python program. It had declarations, classes, variables, did not rely on global variables, and was fairly robust to changes in the target. This got me thinking about the difference between "scripting" and "programming". When I was a computer science undergraduate in the 1990s, I recall the difference was very simple. Programming was done in C or other real languages (with the corresponding heated debate on whether anything except C or assembly counted), scripting was done in bash. For some reason, it does not feel that simple today.

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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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EGNOS Satellite Navigation System Safety Certification

By Paul Parkinson

In case you missed it, yesterday Wind River announced that VxWorks has been selected for the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS), and has been chosen to run the Integrity Processing Facility (IPF) check set.

The IPF, developed and delivered by Logica, is the crucial element that validates the information broadcast by the satellites to safety-critical users such as aircraft in flight or ships navigating through narrow channels. This is essential, because satellite navigation systems alone do not provide sufficient positional accuracy to be used in safety-critical applications.

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Workbench and Jazz

By Emeka Nwafor

Today I managed to carve out some quality hands-on time to play with Wind River Workbench integrated with Rational Team Concert - also known as Jazz. While playing with this development environment, I found myself wishing that "I had these types of development tools back when I was doing embedded development environment".

If you are not familiar with Rational Team Concert (RTC), think of it as a collaborative development platform that unifies planning, tracking, automation of software development processes, team collaboration, work item management, and reporting (think dashboards) with traceability across all artifacts that participate in software delivery processes. By artifacts, I mean things like source code, builds, defects, requirements, log files, change sets, etc... In short, RTC is all about connecting team members.

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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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Multicore Called Up For Active Service

By Paul Parkinson

There's an interesting editorial column 'Multicore Processing Becomes the New Mainstream' in the latest edition of COTS Journal. Jeff Child discusses how multicore processors, after becoming all pervasive in the desktop and server market, are now becoming the norm for embedded aerospace and defence systems. He also shares some insights into why the transition to multicore is necessary, and provides an example of the deployment of multicore in the Aegis Modernisation Programme (AMOD).

Rather tantalizingly, Jeff only mentions software architectures in his final paragraph (maybe that's a subject for a future editorial), where he contrasts the use of Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) on multicore devices with tiled processors (which can be massively parallel architectures).

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The Open Group: Real-Time Embedded Systems Forum, Rome

By Paul Parkinson

Last week, I attended the The Open Group, Rome 2010 conference, specifically the Real-Time Embedded Systems Forum track (agenda), in order to participate in the MILS API standardization working group sessions.

The goal of the working group is to produce a standardized API for a Minimal Runtime (MRT) environment which is suitable for High Assurance systems, which will enable portability of middleware between MILS platforms and aid interoperability. The working group wrestled with some fundamental aspects of the MRT, including goals/objectives, characteristics and implementation architecture, but these were productive sessions. There's still a long way to go, but these were important steps in the right direction. Watch this space for further developments!

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Leaders and Followers

By Mark Hermeling

Events such as ESC in San Jose this week are a great way to talk to a lot of customers in a very short timespan. Hence, a great place to be for a product manager like myself. The conversations show a clear difference between leaders in multicore adoption and followers of that adoption.

The discussions with the followers typically start of a bit timid. They are often afraid of multicore and see it as a necessary evil. After a while, they warm up and they start to see that the migration does not need to be very complicated, yes, it is work, but work that can be managed and controlled.

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What is Simics, Really?

By Jakob Engblom

As you might have seen, Wind River recently acquired Simics, a product formerly sold by Virtutech. My colleagues Michel Genard and Bill Graham recently blogged on the topic.

Simics can have a huge impact on the product development processes, time-to-market and quality. Apart from the cool things that Simics does to improve the development process, it is also a very interesting technology in and by itself.

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So, What Does _Your_ Software Architecture Look Like?

By Mark Hermeling

Customers often ask me in my opinion as to what their path to multi-core should be. Invariably I ask them two things. 1) Describe your current hardware architecture, your next hardware architecture and what your hardware architecture will look like in 3 years; 2) Describe your current software architecture and any plans you have to evolve it.

This leads to interesting discussions, most customers can draw their hardware architectures, some can white board their software architectures easily, some have more problems, but I have a strong feeling that their drawing differs significantly from the actual implementation.

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Radioactive Telepresence

By Mike Deliman

How timely!  A couple of months ago the discussion started - "will unmanned vehicles make a transition into civilian use".  I've been taking the stance that since we're talking vehicles - not just aircraft but all forms of non-stationary robot, that it is inevitable.  Even with aircraft I believe it is inevitable, though it may take a little longer for unmanned / automated aircraft to be certified for use in civilian airspace.

It would make sense that robots would be deployed for things that are either impossible for humans to do, or for things that are hazardous and dangerous.  On the impossible-for-humans side, quick return deep-dive missions in the ocean, and several-day long monitoring missions come to mind, as well as some interesting possibilities for telepresence tourism.  The hazardous side is easy to imagine - everything from maintenance of city infrastructures to handing toxic or radioactive substances would be fair game to use robots for, as well as underground mining.

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ESC Silicon Valley

By Mark Hermeling

Looking forward to my trip to ESC Sillicon Valley next week. It is promising to be a busy show, especially since ESC is now combined with the Multicore expo. I just leafed through the agenda (in the form of a Nxtbook) and found a large number of sessions that I want to attend, experience show though that I'll probably be too busy talking to customer to attend sessions, which is a good problem to have of course.

I am hosting a 4 hour session (with several of my colleagues) on Multicore Demystified on Tuesday afternoon 2.30-7pm (there will be refresments!) in the Hilton Plaza Room. Do stop by either the session, or our booth at Multicore Expo for a chat if you want to brain storm about your next generation devices.

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Quit Bugging Me: Making Maps

By Mike Deliman

A tool commonly used in embedded debugging is a linker map - a map of where all the symbols are in the runtime image.  These maps are useful as they turn raw addresses reported by some exception stubs (etc) into offsets into the data or text (program routines) in the computer's RAM.  They give you an idea of what may have been happening when the error occurred.

Producing a linker map is fairly easy.  Most linkers include command line options to produce a map.  This works fine and is very clear when used from a command line.  But things can get a little confusing from within an integrated gui environment.

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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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More Bacon: Increasing Science Return

By Mike Deliman

In a recent blog I wrote, Bringing Back The Science Bacon, one of the things I talk about is increasing the science returns of a mission by doing some data processing on the mission robot, before it sends back information. 

If a computer has the ability, and the trade-offs gathering data, processing it into information, available computer throughput and bandwidth of the data channel are favorable for processing, data can be processed into information and the mission may return more relevant science.

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And The 2010 SpaceOps Award for Outstanding Achievement Goes To...

By Mike Deliman

Until today, I had never heard of The International Committee on Technical Interchange for Space Mission Operations.  Or the SpaceOps Awards.  An announcement arrived in my email this afternoon.  Guess who/what got the award?  Go on..  :-)  CONGRATULATIONS! 

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Virtualization and Fault Handling

By Mark Hermeling

In several of my previous posts I have written about the fact that embedded virtualization has low overhead, maintains determinism and all that good stuff. I have also written about some of the benefits of virtualization due to partitioning, scalability and such.

However, there is one aspect of virtualization that gets little 'air time' and that is the fact that there the hypervisor really is a nice, lean, partitioned management layer of your multicore (or single core) hardware.

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Software Quality: What You Don’t Know CAN Hurt You

By Paul Henderson

On Tuesday of this week, Jim Lentz, president of Toyota Motors Sales USA, testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee about the car manufacturer’s problems and recalls.  Yes, it was Mr. Lentz’s turn in the proverbial hot seat.

During pointed questioning by House members, Mr. Lentz said that the repairs prescribed by Toyota might “not totally” solve the problem of unintended sudden acceleration in its vehicles. He also admitted that Toyota is still trying to determine the source problem, including the possibility – previously denied – that the vehicles’ electronics systems (software!) might be at fault.

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