Despite virtualization’s obvious appeal to embedded software developers and OEMs, adoption of the technology may stall due to inherent limitations in virtualization platform architecture. Here is a look at the limitations and how they can be overcome by a different approach to building embedded virtualization software.
Over the last five years virtualization has evolved from an obscure technology to become a key enabler of enterprise server and desktop applications. More recently, virtualization has begun to play a comparable pivotal role in embedded development and deployment.
If you want to continue reading Gernot Heiser’s article at Embedded.com, click here.

The highlight of a Danish company dedicated to software testing is that has a 75% of autistic people at its workforce. Thorkil Sonne, the founder, became interested in integrate autistic people in the working world in 2004, when his son was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome (a type of autism that seriously affects the way of relating). Sonne found out that only 6% of the autistic population is integrated into the labour market, and realized that the characteristics of the perfect software tester were the same skills showed by his son: having a good memory, follow instructions carefully, be persistent, note any deviation from the expected results… These are the characteristics of autism.

Currently, 50 people are working in this company, and they remain faithful to this same philosophy: providing future opportunities through integration.

As a tester or test manager, do you have an essential set of tools you take with you to new projects? Whenever I join a project I take with me the collection of low-tech tools I’ve designed and assembled to help me manage testing. It’s tremendously useful to have at hand templates, spreadsheets, and practices that have worked for me in the past, to remind me of what’s important and to get a head start on the work. Even when my client has standardized deliverables, I treat my own tools as checklists to supplement their templates, if necessary, with information I consider essential.

I call this collection my Test Manager’s Vade Mecum, from a Latin phrase whose literal meaning is “go with me.”
If you want to continue reading Fiona Charles’ article at Stickyminds.com, please, click here.

One certainty in this business is watching the pendulum swing. One year, hardware gets most of the attention; the next year, software takes center stage. After a period of deafening buzz about multicore processing, the next swing seems to be heading back in the direction of software as the battlefield for competitive advantage.
It’s logical that an increase in hardware complexity and capability would be followed by attempts to get software caught up and, judging from recent announcements, that appears to be the case. Designers don’t want to spend time optimizing code to run on multiple cores, so they have looked for new tools to optimize software for execution on multiple cores and processors, like OpenMP o Codeplay Sieve C++ Parallel Processing System.
If you want to continue reading Don Dingee’s whole article at Embedded Computer Design, click here.

People have been writing software for over 50 years, and building embedded systems for 30 years. The one constant over all of that time is that features increase while schedules shrink.
We’re trying to manage three conflicting things: an impossible schedule, an excess of desired features, and quality. Remove just one leg of the three, and the project becomes trivial. Can we ship with lots and lots of bugs? If so, getting it out on time is pretty easy. Can we neglect the ship date? With infinite time, we can get every feature working right.
If you want to continue reading Jack Ganssle’s whole article at Embedded.com, click here

11/06/2008 - The drive to reduce product development cycle times, takes to us to think about the possibility of designing a reusable code. It’s apparent that reusing code would decrease project development time, but it also puts the project manager in a dilema: to do an extra effort to design modules of reusable software or to maintain the deadline established by the client and later rework the modules to be reusable.
Dinu P. Madau uses the well-known layer system (see image) to explain the benefits of reusable software, and establishes that the inner layers (interface and Core software) could be conformed by reusable modules if they were independent of hardware. If you want to continue reading Dinu P. Madau’s article, you can do it at Embedded.com.

Thoroughly revised and updated to highlight issues such as how Agile and XP development environments have radically changed the role of software testers by making testing integral to every phase of the development process, the third edition of this reference-book for software testers, developers and engineers is now in print.

The book explains method for testing software in an agile programming environment introduces model-based development and provides explanation of how to conduct testing in a model-based development environment. Contains details of case-studies to guide software testing procedures, explores test-driven development, re-examines all-pairs testing and explains the four contexts of software testing. Features updates throughout text and includes 25% new material. Includes new downloadable programs demonstrating white-box and black-box testing.
 
The author, Paul Jorgensen is a full professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at Grand Valley State University, in Allendale, Michigan, USA. He participated in the four last editions of QA&TEST imparting a tutorial on Model-Based Testing and a presentation titled Comparing all Pairs testing with Mainline Testing Techniques.

Software-Testing- A Craftsman’s approach is available on the Internet.