Testing Embedded Systems - Do You Have the GuTs for It?

by Vincent Encontre. All Rights Reserved.

Vincent Encontre is the Director for Embedded and RealTime, Automated Testing Business Unit, based in Rational’s new engineering center in Toulouse, France. When he’s not traveling, attending meetings, or answering zillions of emails, Vincent looks at the destiny of Rational Test RealTime as a Rational product and as reusable technologies for next generations of Rational products. Vincent has extensive experience in embedded modeling and testing technologies and best practices. Prior to Rational and ATTOL, Vincent spent 13 years at Philips, then at Verilog, designing, marketing, and supporting software engineering tools, believing these tools could help build better software faster. In his spare time, Vincent plays soccer with his three boys and a few others, and just enjoys the wonderful art de vivre from the south of France (before it’s too late…).

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Abstract

This paper gives a general introduction to testing embedded systems followed by a discussion of how embedded systems’ issues affect testing processes and technologies, and how Rational Test RealTime provides solutions to these issues.

It presents an overview of the process of six incremental steps used to test embedded systems. Considering this process (taking into account the full spectrum from very small to very large systems), and the specific characteristics and constraints of embedded systems, we have deduced a set of requirements that an ideal technology must possess to address the testing of embedded systems. Rational Test RealTime, the new Rational offering to the embedded systems domain, exemplifies large portions of this ideal technology.