Wind River Blog Network

What the LA Lakers and Apple iPhone can teach us about software engineering

By Ido Sarig

Half way into the 2010-2011 NBA basketball season, the Pacific division leading LA Lakers had an embarrassing loss to the bottom-dwelling Memphis Grizzlies. The LA Times described the performance of several of the players at the Sunday, Jan.2, 2011 game as “sleep walking” – which turned out to be not far from the truth!

Three Laker players had reported oversleeping the night before the game, because the alarm clocks on their iPhones malfunctioned that morning, part of a well publicized failure.

If this sounds familiar to iPhone users, it’s because it was a repeat of a nearly-identical episode, reported just two months earlier, when the iPhone alarm application failed to operate properly after the switch back from Daylight Saving Time to standard time.

What does this have to do with software engineering? It illustrates a well-known phenomenon in large-scale software applications, researched as early as the 1970s, when IBM performed a “distribution analysis of customer reported defects against their main commercial software applications” and were “surprised to find that defects were not randomly distributed through all of the modules of large applications” – or in plain English - some parts of the code are more buggy than others.

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Shift Left

By Michel Genard

Whether developers or corporations use a formal development process or not, one of the most critical (and risky) milestones is to have access to the target hardware, on-time and on-quantity in order to get going with the software development. Adding to this dependency, the fact that software content has grown to a point where you have more lines of codes in any electronics systems than gates, the debugging, test and integration of these devices are by far the most challenging and overlooked activities. Often OEMs have no other choice than to make compromises to time-to-market and quality levels if they still want to release a product. Beyond trying to reduce cost of labor, deploying the smartest tools, and reusing commercial off the shelf components as much as possible, OEMs and system integrators are also looking for solutions to mitigate these risks and have found simulations such as Wind River Simics as the vector to literally “shift left” their life cycles, enabling them to develop software without the constraint of needing the target hardware to be available or even designed yet. 

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Testing? That’s what customers are for!

By Ido Sarig

Many years ago, circa 1990, as I was starting out my professional career as a software developer with Mercury Interactive, I went on a customer call to a Silicon Valley-based software company, to present our new product for automated software testing. Apparently, our message did not get through, as the response we got at the end of our pitch from the company’s VP of engineering (who shall remain nameless) is the title of this post.

I don’t want to go as far as saying that this was the prevalent attitude in those days, but I also can’t honestly say it was atypical. Back then, many in the industry, especially in engineering roles, thought it was a reasonable process to develop an application, debug it as best you can, ship it, and then fix the remainder of the issues as they surface at customer sites. This, despite numerous studies showing it is much more costly to repair bugs found in the field than it is to find and fix them before shipping.

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Low-cost Android phones: Feature phones an endangered species?

By Chris Buerger

There is no doubt that there will always be a set of consumers that only want their mobile phone to be, well, a phone. Voice calling is likely to remain the ‘killer app’ for the majority of consumers for a long time to come, and there will remain a sizeable section of the mobile phone market that will cater to this demand.

However, the market change to smartphones is undeniable, even in the last bastions of feature phone-centered markets such as Japan and South Korea, Android-based smartphones are rapidly winning market share at the high end of the device spectrum. Now, a second wave of the Android smartphone revolution is happening in many countries, and I am excited to say that Wind River mobile software solutions for Android are right in the thick of things, helping to drive this new wave of devices.

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COTS in Space: Enter The Dragon

By Mike Deliman

Congratulations to Space Exploration Technologies Inc, on their successful venture into orbit.  By launching the Dragon into orbit, successfully orbiting the earth more than once, and returning to the ground, you've made history.

I wish I could have watched the launch and later the landing.  This is absolutely a historic event.

Given the cancellation of the Ares projects, and the recent failure of the launch of the GLONASS satellites, it would seem SpaceX has impeccable timing.

I don't think there was really a question about weather or not commercial entities could handle space exploration and the creation of rockets.  One of the big questions was "could it be done safely without all the oversight?" 

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Debug, multicore, and more debug

By Jakob Engblom

I recently gave a talk at an industry-academia collaboration called ICES, Innovative Center for Embedded Systems, at KTH in Kista, Stockholm, Sweden. The theme was embedded multicore, and I realized that my role at these events seems to have changed. A few years ago, I would be the "embedded guy", defending the collective of embedded systems against speakers assuming that everything was a homogeneous shared-memory multiprocessor. This time was different, though. I have become the "debug fanatic."

There seems to be less need to explain embedded multicore nowadays. The academic community and multicore event participants seem to have finally accepted that there are systems out there that use more than one operating systems on a single chip (thanks to hypervisors, AMP setups, local-memory configurations, etc) and that we have hardware that is highly heterogeneous (with different makes and different types of cores all being part of a single system). In the final panel discussion, I found myself saying "build the hardware anyway you like, as long as I have good hardware debug support and introspection features".

I think this is indicative of a general truth: if you cannot debug it, you cannot build it. For multicore in particular, debug is scrambling to catch up.

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Embedded Virtualization in Gaming

By Mark Hermeling

A few weeks ago I found myself in the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas. My reason for being there was a seminar that Wind River was organizing together with Intel and AVNET specifically focussed on companies that build gaming. The main topics were graphics, manageability and of course, virtualization.

I am always eager to fold real-life examples into my presentations, hence I decided to try my luck at some of the slot machines in the Hard Rock Hotel under the disguise of 'domain study'. And I have to say, the state of slot machines has progressed significantly since the last time that I was in Vegas many years ago. The top of the line machines had multiple 30" inch displays with either static or moving imagery, they had player tracking, surround sound, some of them even had imagery over the rolls themselves.

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Embedded Virtualization and Multi-Core

By Mark Hermeling

VDC has released a recent report showing that multi-core is making fast inroads in embedded systems and we are seeing that at Wind River as well. There are exciting new possibilities with these chips, we have never had this much processing power in such small packages.

Take for example Freescale's new P4080 chip, 8 cores, 2 memory busses and a wealth of peripherals that are designed for multicore usage (such as the data path acceleration architecture (DPAA)). There are many things to consider with this new chip, I have blogged before about the many primary multi-core configurations available from SMP to uAMP, to sAMP to core virtualized. You have to consider partitioning, or virtualizing cores, memory and devices.

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National Cybersecurity Strategy

By Paul Parkinson

On Monday, the UK government published its new national security strategy (PDF). This outlines the current and emerging security threats to the UK national interests, ranked by priority based on likelihood and impact. What caught my attention was the fact that theTier 1 (highest priority) threats include:  

'Hostile attacks on UK cyber space by other states and large scale cyber crime'

Until fairly recently, the threat of cyberwarfare has mainly been discussed in defence and security journals (see 'Evaluating Cyber Security', Digital Battlespace, Aug 2009), but there has been a growing focus on this in the mainstream media (although whether this is due to an increasing threat or an increasing media appetite is subjective).

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It's a Beautiful Day

By Emeka Nwafor

I have been totally absorbed by the media coverage of the incredible rescue of the thirty-three Chilean miners that were trapped about a kilometer below the earth's surface for months. The images of jubilation as "Super Mario" and the other miners exited the pod will be imprinted in our minds forever. A real Feel Good Story.

Many thanks to the scientists, engineers, and rescue specialists from across the planet for playing their part in bringing up the 33 miners and 4 rescue workers and for making this A Beautiful Day.

Between reports of the rescue of the individual Chilean miners, CNN's report on the "Best Jobs in America" caught my attention, my curiousity, and briefly diverted my focus from the rescue (and my day job). Of the top-100 jobs, I was pleasantly surprised to see that "Software Architect" ranked at the top - #1 in America. "Product Management Director" and "Software Engineering/Development Director" were in the top-20 - this was a pleasant but credible surprise. "Telecommunications Network Engineer", "Test Software Development Engineer", "R&D Manager", and "Systems Engineer" were all in the top-50. Very interesting considering that these rankings are based on criteria like compensation, job growth, and quality of life.

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VxWorks MILS 2.1 Platform hands-on

By Paul Parkinson

Last week, I visited Wind River headquarters in Alameda, California, to learn about VxWorks MILS Platform 2.1 and to get hands-on experience with the release.

I had been looking forward to the trip, as the 2.1 release adds some significant new capabilities: Wind River Linux as a guest operating system and the new High Assurance Network Stack (see Bill Graham's recent blog for a more detailed overview).

So, the VxWorks MILS separation kernel (SK) can now host Wind River Linux, VxWorks and a High Assurance Environment as guest operating systems in a virtualised environment (as shown below).

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Variable and Deterministic

By Jakob Engblom

A virtual platform like Wind River Simics is generally designed to be deterministic. Determinism brings a host of benefits to users (repeatability of bugs, reverse execution, bug transportation, etc.), but is also easily misunderstood. Quite often, users fear that they will lose an important "feature" of a physical machine - its built-in variation across runs of the same software. If the virtual platform is deterministic, surely it will not expose all the different ways a program can run that you get on a random physical machine? Yes it can.

There is a huge difference between the repeatable determinism of a virtual machine and completely invariant, predictable, predetermined behavior.

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Test Automation Meets Simulation

By Paul Henderson

I'm seeing increasing interest from many companies in using simulation environments with test automation systems to accelerate the testing process. Specifically, putting Wind River Test Management together with Wind River Simics is getting creative juices flowing in industry thought leaders.

Why? Well, development teams have started to realize the benefits of simulation systems for speeding and validating system and software design, and for accelerating software development and debug in advance of hardware availabilty. And even when hardware is available, systems like Simics provide tremendous access and control to speed analysis and diagnsotics.

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Transporting Bugs with Checkpoints

By Jakob Engblom

I have a paper about "Transporting Bugs with Checkpoints" to be presented at the S4D (System, Software, SoC and Silicon Debug) conference in Southampton, UK, on September 15 and 16, 2010. The core concept presented is to leverage Wind River Simics checkpointing to capture and move a bug from the bug reporter to the responsible developer. It is a fairly simple idea, but getting it to work efficiently does require that some things are done right.

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Wind River and IBM Attack Software Quality

By Paul Henderson

As I've mentioned before, we've been working with IBM Rational for some time around quality management automation. Both companies see the skyrocketing software content and architectural complexity in the embedded device market as creating a tipping point where companies will not be able to continue with business as usual.

Product development teams will need to take a more managed and automated approach to quality that spans across the lifecycle and access into the devices under test. This is particularly true in markets that require strict adherance to standards and compliance regulations.

We put together a joint whitepaper on this subject downloadable from here. And we are also having a joint web seminar next week on Tuesday Aug 31 at 2pm EDT. You can register for this event here.

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VxWorks in Education: University of São Paulo, Brazil - Part 2

By Bill Graham

In part two of my interview with Professor Glauco Caurin, we talk about some the research projects that they working on and how they are using VxWorks and other Wind River products:

Q: Tell us about the research projects you have make use of Wind River Products. Can you give us more detail on the Kanguera, the five fingers robot hand? Which of our software are you using? Where is it used and why?

We are using VxWorks now for some years with different platforms. More then 8 years ago we started the first research projects with the hardware funded by FAPESP using VxWorks donated by Wind River as the RTOS. The projects were related to the development of robot grippers and hands.

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It’s Time for Testers to Step Up

By Paul Henderson

RTC Magazine recently published an article that I wrote called "Time to Rethink Software Testing for Embedded Devices". In it I describe some of the new techniques that are possible, and I believe necessary, to delivery high quality device software for embedded devices.

• When staying 'positive' doesn't pay
• Getting negative with white box testing
• Focusing on the 'deltas' with change-based test automation

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Test Driven Development Meets Continuous Integration

By Paul Henderson

In my last posting I mentioned I'd be running a webinar with James Grenning on Agile testing. James is a recognized expert and frequent speaker on the topic of software development and one of the original authors of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

We talked about the case for agility where today's embedded software projects are inevitably faced with changing requirements and market conditions that cause unplanned, mid-course corrections. The result is what went in is often not what was expected to come out. Testing folks are the tail trying to wag the dog as they try to test in quality at the end of the project.

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VxWorks in Education: University of São Paulo, Brazil - Part 1

By Bill Graham

Wind River regularly contributes to education programs across the globe. One of these institutions is the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil. They are doing some amazing things with VxWorks and Wind River products play a big role in research and education in their engineering programs. In the next few posts I have transcribed an interview with Professor Glauco Caurin who teaches in robotics, mechatronics and mechanical engineering at USP's São Carlos Engineering School:

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Industry Investing in Better Device Runtime Visibility During Testing

By Paul Henderson

Here’s the final installment in my series about our embedded device software industry testing survey conducted in April-May 2010 with almost 900 respondents (see previous blog postings).  If you’d like a copy of the full report in pdf, please drop me an email at [email protected] and I will send it to you.

In this section of the survey we asked participants about what test tools they use today and where they are investing in test automation. Given the high cost of product failure, accelerating complexity and reduced schedules the industry is turning to more test automation in 2010 to help address these problems. The top investment are moving to new tools that can help test teams and their management better understand how well they are testing, better focus their efforts on the areas needing testing, and reduce cycle time through more automation.

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The High Cost of Poor Quality – Brand, Market, Budget

By Paul Henderson

I’m continuing my series on our embedded device industry software testing survey conducted in April-May 2010 with almost 900 respondents (see previous blog posting).  If you’d like a copy of the full report in pdf, please drop me an email at [email protected] and I will send it to you.

In this section of the survey we asked participants about how they measure the high cost of poor quality. Respondents told us that the true cost of poor quality is much higher than program budget. The majority of respondents showed that the true cost of poor quality is measure by damage to company brand and lost revenue due to missed market windows.

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When is Scripting really Programming?

By Jakob Engblom

I recently updated some analysis scripts in Simics to use the new OS awareness framework in Simics 4.4. While doing so, I completely updated the structure of the code, ending up with something looking suspiciously like a regular Python program. It had declarations, classes, variables, did not rely on global variables, and was fairly robust to changes in the target. This got me thinking about the difference between "scripting" and "programming". When I was a computer science undergraduate in the 1990s, I recall the difference was very simple. Programming was done in C or other real languages (with the corresponding heated debate on whether anything except C or assembly counted), scripting was done in bash. For some reason, it does not feel that simple today.

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Compressed Schedules Driving Shorter Testing & Defect Resolution Requirements

By Paul Henderson

Today I'm continuing my series on our embedded device software industry testing survey conducted in April-May 2010 with almost 900 respondents (see previous blog posting).  If you’d like a copy of the full report in pdf, please drop me an email at [email protected]and I will send it to you.

In part 2 of the survey we asked about schedule compression and what affect that was having on the device testing cycle. A majority of survey participants reported that market conditions have forced them to shorten their development schedules by as much as 18 months.

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A Crisis of Complexity – Industry Report on Growing Challenges in Embedded Testing

By Paul Henderson

I’ve been talking a lot with embedded device companies around the world over the last few years and I am hearing growing concerns about software testing. I’ve mentioned several of these concerns in previous blogs. I wanted to get more quantifiable data and get some feedback that could help us shape our products and services to help. So I decided to run a survey to gather important data from our community.

The focus of this survey was to gain a detailed snapshot of how executives, development managers, QA and test team leaders and other involved staff currently view the embedded device software quality test landscape. Recent changes, new challenges and strategies for managing them were of particular interest.  So I fielded a four-part survey to individuals who work for embedded products companies. In total, nearly 35,000 individuals in North America were invited to participate in the survey via emails. 

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EGNOS Satellite Navigation System Safety Certification

By Paul Parkinson

In case you missed it, yesterday Wind River announced that VxWorks has been selected for the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS), and has been chosen to run the Integrity Processing Facility (IPF) check set.

The IPF, developed and delivered by Logica, is the crucial element that validates the information broadcast by the satellites to safety-critical users such as aircraft in flight or ships navigating through narrow channels. This is essential, because satellite navigation systems alone do not provide sufficient positional accuracy to be used in safety-critical applications.

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Workbench and Jazz

By Emeka Nwafor

Today I managed to carve out some quality hands-on time to play with Wind River Workbench integrated with Rational Team Concert - also known as Jazz. While playing with this development environment, I found myself wishing that "I had these types of development tools back when I was doing embedded development environment".

If you are not familiar with Rational Team Concert (RTC), think of it as a collaborative development platform that unifies planning, tracking, automation of software development processes, team collaboration, work item management, and reporting (think dashboards) with traceability across all artifacts that participate in software delivery processes. By artifacts, I mean things like source code, builds, defects, requirements, log files, change sets, etc... In short, RTC is all about connecting team members.

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What’s New in Wind River Test Management 3.3?

By Paul Henderson

Today we announced the latest version of Wind River Test Management, Release 3.3, our test automation system for monitoring, executing and managing embedded device software testing. Wind River Test Management lets teams optimally execute complex tests while dynamically gathering information from the production software under test as it is running, without requiring special pre-instrumented software builds. This approach allows teams to adopt new white-box test techniques that give testers visibility into the operation of the device and help them determine the thoroughness of the tests, quickly identify defects and performance bottlenecks, and focus efforts on sections of software that are most in need of testing.

Release 3.3 is a major new release that adds a number of significant new features. You can learn more and download several new whitepapers from www.windriver.com/products/test_management.

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Wind River @ IBM Rational Innovate 2010

By Paul Henderson

Today marked the opening of the annual IBM Rational Software developer conference, this year called Innovate 2010, here in Orlando Florida.

The 4 day event is covering a range of topics on both IT and embedded systems software development and test lifecycle tools and technologies. Wind River has a presence on the exhibit floor and a number of conference tracks. The mood is very positive at this 13th conference. 4000 attendees are here, a 20% growth over 2009.

The show opened with several IBM executives led by Dr. Danny Sabbah, GM IBM Rational Software reviewing IBM's "Smarter Planet" strategy including "systems and software econometrics". Dr. Sabbah described how software innovations are now driving the world, particularly as related to intelligent products and services.  

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Multicore Called Up For Active Service

By Paul Parkinson

There's an interesting editorial column 'Multicore Processing Becomes the New Mainstream' in the latest edition of COTS Journal. Jeff Child discusses how multicore processors, after becoming all pervasive in the desktop and server market, are now becoming the norm for embedded aerospace and defence systems. He also shares some insights into why the transition to multicore is necessary, and provides an example of the deployment of multicore in the Aegis Modernisation Programme (AMOD).

Rather tantalizingly, Jeff only mentions software architectures in his final paragraph (maybe that's a subject for a future editorial), where he contrasts the use of Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) on multicore devices with tiled processors (which can be massively parallel architectures).

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The Open Group: Real-Time Embedded Systems Forum, Rome

By Paul Parkinson

Last week, I attended the The Open Group, Rome 2010 conference, specifically the Real-Time Embedded Systems Forum track (agenda), in order to participate in the MILS API standardization working group sessions.

The goal of the working group is to produce a standardized API for a Minimal Runtime (MRT) environment which is suitable for High Assurance systems, which will enable portability of middleware between MILS platforms and aid interoperability. The working group wrestled with some fundamental aspects of the MRT, including goals/objectives, characteristics and implementation architecture, but these were productive sessions. There's still a long way to go, but these were important steps in the right direction. Watch this space for further developments!

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