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

10.6 Metrics for OO Designs

10.6.1 General Aspects

Experience gained in recent years has shown that OO designs bring new problems to the testing process. As shown in Figure 10.35, whether we're dealing with classes, objects, or systems, three aspects are central to the design: structure, dynamics, and function.

From an overall perspective, testing is much the same for all systems structured as sets of software machines – with one proviso. If the machines are OO objects and inheritance is used, then new, significant factors come into play. Many specific issues are discussed in the following sections.

As portrayed here, system-level testing is akin to integration testing. Here, the following aspects have a major effect on the amount of testing needed:

  • Coupling between objects
  • Responses to messages
  • Methods available (which impacts on the first two points)

By testing such features, we can establish the following:

  • Overall functional behavior...