Interview: How does a Model Checker work?
Model Checking is part of the Formal Methods which address formal specification, formal development, formal verification and theorem provers. Model Checking belongs to the formal verification and provides a complete mathematical proof to verify your system-under-test. BTC EmbeddedPlatform uses the model checking technology for structural test data generation to achieve full code coverage, for formal […]
3 Reasons to Consider Using a Floating-Point Model to Generate Fixed-Point Code
Despite the availability of fast processors with dedicated floating-point support, we still see many projects generating fixed-point code from Simulink. The reason for this is not only the resource usage, but also the more transparent and predictable mathematical behavior. You can read more about this in our previous articles “What you should know about fixed-point” […]
ISO 26262 Functional Safety Requirement Types
With the aim to provide technical coherence, reliability and safety, requirements engineering is the process for defining, documenting and managing requirements. In the 90s, the IEEE provided a general definition of requirements engineering with five phases: elicitation, analysis, specification, verification and management. Within each industry, requirements engineering has been adapted to the specific domain of […]
Why and How to Improve Requirements
“How do you manage your requirements?” We ask this question quite often in customer meetings. The people we meet are usually developers and testers in the automotive industry. In most cases the answers range between “We do not have any requirements. The model represents them.” and “We use a requirements management system; however, the requirements […]
What You Should Know About Fixed-Point Code
Vocabulary: Floating-point code? – Fixed-point code? – Scaling? – Resolution? – LSB? Basically, we can distinguish between two kinds of datatypes in embedded code: Floating-point and Integer. An integer variable basically represents whole numbers and the value range is limited by the number of bits. For example, an (unsigned) 8bit Integer can represent 2^8=256 different values, by default […]
How to Set Up Jenkins From Scratch on Your Own PC in 5 Minutes
Optimization “We know that Jenkins is great and all but we’re not some cloud-based start up. It would take ages to have server infrastructure available only to realize that it doesn’t support our workflows and tools after all.” Even though Jenkins is rapidly growing in automotive embedded software development I hear a lot of stories […]
When and how to generate test cases automatically
The automatic test case generation has always been a controversial topic. While some people dream about stopping any manual test activities others say that test generation is not allowed. But who is right? Test Goals for automatic test case generation Let’s have a quick look at the possible test goals for which we can generate […]
The Power of Focus – How to Optimize a Model Checker for Embedded Software
1. Focus on effectiveness to solve the problem of your customer! Since day one we address exactly the problem classes our customer needs to solve, i.e. large-sized auto-generated embedded code –on the one hand– with integer, floating point and pointer arithmetic, large look-up tables, and state-flow logic but –on the other hand– even without recursive functions, memory allocation, and […]
AUTOSAR – What Every Function Developer Should Know…
In recent decades, the demands for designing smarter and safer vehicles has caused a significant increase in the size and complexity of the automotive systems software. In a modern high-end passenger car, more than 100 million software lines of code (SLoC) are embedded and distributed across as many as 80 ECUs communicating in a network […]
Modular Model-based Software Architecture for Efficient Unit and Integration Test
Model-based design (MBD) is well established in automotive to develop embedded software but with the growing size and complexity of software, handling big sized model is often a challenge. MBD enables to easily craft a software application and from one step to another refine it, test it and generate the production code. However, it’s risky to start […]