QA&TEST Blog

Results from Byte Paradigm’s 2009 and 2010 surveys show that embedded systems engineers widely recognize prototyping as an efficient methodology to speed up embedded system debug, no matter the type of embedded system or its maximum speed.
In the constant quest to achieve shrinking time-to-market, reducing the time spent on a prominent task such as debugging is undoubtedly of great value. Prototyping does help shorten the overall design cycle time and boost the engineer’s productivity.

Innovative, flexible and powerful digital pattern generators are one of the key elements to speed up embedded system debug on prototype. innovation in PC instrumentation can lead to boosting the designer’s productivity and help design better and faster.

Click here to continue reading this article at Embedded Computing Desing

Non-destructive internal inspection of MEMS bonded wafer pairs via acoustic micro imaging is useful in finding, characterizing and eliminating anomalies and defects.
During product development, acoustic inspection is helpful is modifying processes to avoid defects. During production, acoustic inspection spots rejects and identifies process drift.

The ultrasonic transducer that scans the wafer pair pulses UHF ultrasound into the top surface and receives the return echoes. Pulse-echo occurs thousands of times per second as the transducer moves across the surface. Each scanned x-y coordinate yields one pixel in the acoustic image which, in the high resolution typically used for MEMS wafers, consists of millions of pixels.
Click here to continue reading this article at Embedded.com

Some test teams may be stumped on how to transition to agile. If you’re in such a team, you probably have manual tests for regression either because you never have had the time to automate them or because you are testing from the GUI and it doesn’t make sense to automate them. You probably have great exploratory testers who can find problems inside complex applications, yet they tend not to automate their testing and need a final product before they start testing. How do you make it work? How do you keep up with development?

This is a common problem. In many organizations, developers think they have transitioned to agile while testers are still stuck in manual testing efforts and unable to “keep up” at the end of the iteration. The problem isn’t that the testers are too slow but that the team does not own “done,” and, until the team owns “done” and works together to achieve it, the testers will appear too slow.

Click here to read this article at Sticky Minds. 

Embedded systems are now pervasively deployed in diverse large markets: industrial, medical, telecom, home appliance, consumer, Automotive, and others. As Internet adoption proliferates, more embedded devices and applications are being connected to networks to take advantage of the extraordinary benefits of the Web. Some experts predict that the number of Web-connected devices will soon exceed the number of human users and grow to far higher levels.

The success of Internet-connected consumer products and applications results from the remarkable progress vendors have made in providing ease of use and Security, thus removing major barriers to widespread usage by people of all ages across the globe. Billions of users now confidently make transactions online with public and private companies, banks, and health organizations. They purchase books, cars, stocks, retirement plans, insurance policies, and many other things. Consumers and businesses exchange products of small and large dollar values over the Internet.
But what about the millions of Web-connected devices – how secure will they be?

Click here to continue reading this article at Embedded Computing Desing

Unit Test has been around almost as long as software development itself. It just makes sense to take each application building block, build it in isolation, and execute it with test data to make sure that it does just what it should do without any confusing input from the remainder of the application.

In the past, the sting came from not being able to simply lift a software unit from its development environment, compile and run it ” let alone supply it with test data.
For that to happen, you need a harness program acting as a holding mechanism that calls the unit, details any included files, “stubs” written to handle any procedure calls by the unit, and offers any initialization sequences which prepare data structures for the unit under test to act upon.

Click here to continue reading this article at Embedded.com

Due to the increasing importance of solutions using embedded software and the relatively small numbers of skilled and experienced programmers, embedded systems development is being undertaken in a wide cross section of industries by the very same experts.
The availability of target-specific testing and development tools, and the desire to use standard development tools for the majority of the code work are the main reasons for these OS to be sought after.
According to the study “standards conformance and interoperability” and the “ease of porting code to new target platforms” seem to be less important to developers.
This might be because decisions concerning the choice of OS on which to build embedded applications, are more related to the device that will house the application than in other areas of software development.
Embedded system development is still a young area and likely to grow in importance. Click here to read the whole article at The Register.

The first multicore platforms have found their way into embedded systems for entertainment and communication, especially thanks to their greater computational power, flexibility, and energy efficiency. However, as we will show, mapping applications onto these systems remains a challenge that is costly, slow, and prone to errors.
Although the multicore programmable architectures have a huge potential to tackle present and future applications, a key issue is still open: how can developers map an application onto such a multicore platform fast and efficiently, while profiting from the potential benefits of parallel processing?

Click here to continue reading this article at Embedded.com

Can a large organization adopt agile approaches to software development when the organization holds the notion that not all projects should be agile? In other words, can there be a mix of waterfall-type projects and agile projects in the same organization? The short answer is yes, however there is a cost that must be paid for this coexistence.

In transitioning to agile, most companies gradually transition a few teams at a time, learning from their successes and mistakes and applying the new knowledge to the rollout of new agile teams. This process can take months or years, depending on the size of the organization and the stability of management and agile champions.

Click here to continue reading this article at Sticky Minds.

The question “what is embedded?” continues to plague many of us, even those who are deep in the throes of the technology. It’s sometimes easier to make a point using a negative. For example, could you imagine a world without embedded technology.  Probably not. If that were the case, we’d be without computers, vehicles as we know them today, any type of aircraf, cell phones, the Internet…
In fact, most of our industries would not be doing business the way they do it today without embedded technologies. And yet, a vast majority of the general population will have a perplexed look on their face when you ask them “what is embedded?”

Click here to continue reading this article at Embedded.com

Virtualization, a concept of the mainframe computing and business IT world, is no longer a technology restricted to large computing centers and business computing environments. Increasingly confronted with the requirement to communicate with business IT and to integrate complex processing environments, programmers and developers of embedded systems increasingly rely on virtualization techniques.

Click here to continue reading this article at Embedded Europe.