Book Image

The Complete Edition - Software Engineering for Real-Time Systems

By : Jim Cooling
Book Image

The Complete Edition - Software Engineering for Real-Time Systems

By: Jim Cooling

Overview of this book

From air traffic control systems to network multimedia systems, real-time systems are everywhere. The correctness of the real-time system depends on the physical instant and the logical results of the computations. This book provides an elaborate introduction to software engineering for real-time systems, including a range of activities and methods required to produce a great real-time system. The book kicks off by describing real-time systems, their applications, and their impact on software design. You will learn the concepts of software and program design, as well as the different types of programming, software errors, and software life cycles, and how a multitasking structure benefits a system design. Moving ahead, you will learn why diagrams and diagramming plays a critical role in the software development process. You will practice documenting code-related work using Unified Modeling Language (UML), and analyze and test source code in both host and target systems to understand why performance is a key design-driver in applications. Next, you will develop a design strategy to overcome critical and fault-tolerant systems, and learn the importance of documentation in system design. By the end of this book, you will have sound knowledge and skills for developing real-time embedded systems.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Preface
15
Glossary of terms

10.4 Dynamic Analysis – Testing and Coverage Analysis

10.4.1 Overview of Dynamic Testing

Static analysis is a useful and effective way of producing high-quality code. Unfortunately, it can't tell us precisely what the software will do when it's executed. Thus, we have no choice but to resort to running the code itself – dynamic testing. Here, we first look at some of the underlying concepts and practical problems of dynamically testing software. The following section deals with methods used to judge the completeness of such testing: coverage analysis. The two items taken together – dynamic testing and coverage analysis – constitute the component parts of dynamic analysis.

In real-time systems, dynamic testing is widely used to check the behavior of runtime software. The basic approach – shown in Figure 10.14(a) – is to:

  • Stimulate the software to be tested
  • Measure the resulting responses:
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