QA&TEST Blog

Linux has been deployed as the defacto standard for a wide variety of embedded applications across virtually every market segment. Developers today are facing huge development challenges brought on by insanely short development cycles and ever-increasing hardware and software complexity driven by customer demand and competitive pressures.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of embedded systems is that each is a unique combination of hardware and software components.

Click here to read this article at Embedded Computing Design.

The customer is often wrong. The agile notion of constantly soliciting customer feedback and incorporating that input into a product is a brilliant way to produce prototypes. Prototypes, of course, are poorly-implemented skeletons that mirror a real product.
Their function is to quickly minimize risk, which arises from vague requirements, unknown science issues, or from other uncertainties. Prototypes are invaluable when needed but are not required for every product. Maybe not for most.
Engineering teams need to be sheltered from customers when developing the real product.
Click here to read the hole article at EE Times.

A good idea is a valuable asset, and a lot of good ideas can be like a treasure trove. But what do you do with those ideas?  Many ideas wither, not because they are bad ideas, but because of clumsy presentation. Most nascent ideas stand a better chance if you remember these four things:

1. It’s not about you.
Most of the time, people pursue a new idea because they can see how it will help them. Don’t just tell them why you think your idea is a good one. See the world from their point of view, and frame the idea in terms of what matters to them. If your manager cares only about cost, then talking about quality, speed, reuse, or elegance won’t convince him to try your idea. Connect your idea with what’s important to the people you are hoping to influence.

2. It is about who you know.
Bringing your ideas to fruition is a social process. You will need the aid and interest of others to make your idea reality.

Click here to continue reading this article at Sticky Minds.

By best estimates, the software development effort behind 90 nm chip designs has already surpassed the hardware development effort. The projection for 2011 is that less than 40 percent of the overall chip development cost will be spent on hardware. Software now dominates project cycles and determines when a chip can get into volume production. As a result, the importance of software verification has increased, and software has taken on an integral role in the hardware verification process.

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

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

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

QA&TEST has just recently inaugurated a brand new QA&TEST Research & Analysis Centre, by carrying out a first research study about “Challenges and Opportunities of the Embedded Software Quality and Testing”.

The objective of this first study was to identify the principal areas of interest for the software industry in the field of testing and quality. This study was intended as a starting point, to analyse the state of the industry and the challenges and opportunities that will be faced in the future, as well as a means to trigger deeper research in this field, which will be carried out by the QA&TEST Research & Analysis Centre in the future.

Read the rest of this entry »