Designing for defect-intolerant embedded systems

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There are many different approaches to achieving the 3R's of software product development - the right product at the right price and at the right time. Proponents of Agile Methodologies advocate for light-weight development processes that combine increased customer involvement with early and repeated testing. It has been suggested that an Agile highly test-oriented design process would be highly appropriate for embedded world development. However, reports demonstrating transfer from the business world into this new environment have been slow in coming. To improve the acceptance of embedded Agile concepts we have (1) proposed and applied an eXtreme Programming Inspired (XPI) embedded life-cycle and (2) successfully prototyped embedded test driven processes supported through an Embedded-Unit test framework across a range of embedded system architectures in an industrial environment. From discussions with our industrial and research collaborators, a repeated theme was to extend our original XPI ideas to provide additional processes and tools to support embedded development for telecommunication, medical, video and other products; in particular assistance in developing new and (reliably) integrate existing complex DSP algorithms that interact with both the user and each other. This proposal, collaboratively funded through NSERC, Analog Devices Inc and a number of Calgary companies (Ivoxx, SMART Technologies and CDL Systems), plans to overcome these limitations with extensions to our Embedded Unit test framework to pro-actively identify defects using a test driven development process.