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

13.6 Some Practical Issues in Performance Engineering

13.6.1 A General Comment

Software performance engineering is a subject that can be handled at many levels. For in-depth work, detailed knowledge of both tools and techniques is needed. Such topics are well beyond the scope of this book. Good material can be found in the texts by Connie Smith [SMI90], Raj Jain [JAI91], and Knepell and Arangno [KNE93]. Here, though, we'll limit ourselves to a brief outline of some important points.

The most important part of software performance engineering thing is not the modeling itself. It is to first establish:

  • What do you want to do?
  • Why do you want to do it?
  • How the results will be used?
  • Which modeling technique (or techniques) is best suited to the problem?
  • How much it is going to cost in manpower, time, and money (a sensible budget is 5% of the project costs)?

Only when these points have been covered should a decision be made to develop performance...