Designing for defect-intolerant embedded systems

有许多不同的方法来实现软件产品开发的3R-在正确的时间以正确的价格提供正确的产品。敏捷方法论的支持者提倡轻量级开发过程，将增加的客户参与与早期和重复的测试相结合。有人建议，敏捷的高度面向测试的设计过程将非常适合嵌入式世界的开发。然而，表明从商业世界向这一新环境转移的报告来得很慢。为了提高嵌入式敏捷概念的接受度，我们（1）提出并应用了极限编程启发（XPI）嵌入式生命周期，以及（2）成功地对嵌入式测试驱动流程进行了原型设计，该流程通过嵌入式单元测试框架支持，跨一系列嵌入式系统架构在工业环境中。 在与我们的工业和研究合作者的讨论中，一个重复的主题是扩展我们最初的XPI想法，以提供额外的流程和工具来支持电信，医疗，视频和其他产品的嵌入式开发;特别是帮助开发新的和（可靠地）集成现有的复杂DSP算法，这些算法可以与用户交互。该提案由NSERC、ADI公司和多家卡尔加里公司（Ivoxx、SMART Technologies和CDL Systems）共同资助，计划通过扩展我们的嵌入式单元测试框架来克服这些限制，从而使用测试驱动的开发流程主动识别缺陷。

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.