QA&TEST Blog

There are more and more companies in Europe that hire testers with Asperger’s Syndrom or autism.  This practice has advantages and inconvenients, and the best way to discover them is talking to a person affected by this syndrome. Tirsh Khoo, tester in Sydney for a known management platform of email campaigns, has arranged an interview with Michael Drejer, who has Asperger syndrome and works as a tester in a company in Denmark.

Click here to read the whole interview.

Let’s define the smart grid as the infrastructure and technologies that enable integration of the consumer and distributed resources (generation, renewables, storage, demand response, load control) with the operation of the entire grid and electricity markets, while also improving the reliability and Security of the overall electric service. The biggest gap is the lack of inexpensive, standardized, and ubiquitous communications that deliver bandwidth, extreme reliability, and security for both control and management applications as well as basic information management and sharing applications. This broadband communications infrastructure does not need to be one technology, but it needs to extend all the way from central control systems to end-user devices.

Click here to read this whole article at Embedded Computing Design.

We asked what looks to have been a pretty contentious question – what’s the role of managers in software development? – and we got some pretty contentious answers, which are well worth a look in their entirety. The conclusion: a lot of managers are crap. But – and it’s a big but – they don’t have to be, if they get certain basics in place.
Here are your very own top five golden rules, compiled from your comments, which managers can employ to build trust and get the best out of developers. These rules may seem like common sense, but we know from the feedback that they are as frequent as a night bus.
1. Protect the team from unnecessary distractions: A manager’s job is to help the developers to work as productively as possible towards logical and achievable project goals by protecting the team. He must also earn the team’s respect by fighting heroically for them against the boneheaded stupidity to be found in swampy stagnant meeting rooms across Britain.

Click here to continue reading this article at  The Register

It seems obvious that automation will affect the test organization. Less obvious—but no less real—is that it will also affect the development organization. In fact, when you choose to automate the testing for an application, your relationship with development changes completely.

Think about it. Manual testers only have to be able to interact with the application using the screen, keyboard, and mouse or other device. Automated test tools, on the other hand, have to interact with the software at a deeper level, thus exposing the inner workings of the code and perhaps uncovering problems that prevent or complicate automation. If you’re not careful, developers might think you have suddenly transformed into an interfering busybody who is sticking your nose into their business.

This shift in your relationship with development can be handled in a bad way or a good way.

Click here to read this article at Sticky Minds.

It’s been said for every measure, there’s a countermeasure, and that’s also true for securing code in embedded systems. Sometimes a small device can be just the countermeasure needed to thwart cloning of flash contents.

Many systems use external standard flash memory chip(s) to store the operating program for processors that do not include embedded nonvolatile program storage. This is great because it allows easy flash memory expansion and software modification, perhaps in the manufacturing line as a customer download or during a maintenance operation. The downside is that the OEM loses control over the contents of the flash, potentially allowing unauthorized copies or modification.

Click here to continue reading this article at Embedded Computing Design.

Teams who perform unit testing on a regular basis are perceived to be more reliable, professional and advanced. But what do you need to consider before choosing a unit testing solution?

We have developed the ‘8 commandments’ below as a guide for ensuring you select a unit testing solution that is right for your development.

1. Thou shalt not waste time on the learning curve
When choosing a unit testing solution, you will want one that will require minimal time for implementation. It may be worthwhile to time a new developer within your team with the framework to get an accurate idea of how long it takes to get started. For example – how long will it take them to write the first three tests for some class in your system? Is the API clear and simple? Is there a single point of entry in the API? Is there clear guidance on what to do at each step of the way? How often, if at all, do you need to check the docs and tutorials? How easy is it to look for the next step when you’re not sure what to do? Some tools offer guidance within the IDE, while some provide extensive help. Some don’t do either.

Click here to continue reading this article at EE Times Embedded.

Ask an engineer what he is doing and there is a good chance his answer will be, “I am debugging.” Day in and day out, project after project, engineers debug — it’s part of being an engineer. Sometimes, it’s quick and easy, but sometimes it’s hard, not obvious, time consuming, and unpredictable. Everyone knows that debugging is a dreaded but necessary part of the design and verification process.
One alarming trend that is not necessary is the increasing proportion that debugging consumes in the design cycle. Within functional verification, it is the single largest component at approximately 60 percent and is projected to grow even larger. Broadly speaking, the reason for this trend is that traditional debug practices are not adequate for today’s problems.
Sooner or later, debug will get your attention.

Click here to continue reading this article at Embedded.com

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

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.