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Test-Driven Development as a Reliable Embedded Software Engineering Practice

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Embedded and Real Time System Development: A Software Engineering Perspective

Part of the book series: Studies in Computational Intelligence ((SCI,volume 520))

Abstract

Due to embedded co-design considerations, testing embedded software is typically deferred after the integration phase. Contrasting with the current embedded engineering practices, Test-Driven Development (TDD) promotes testing software during its development, even before the target hardware becomes available. Principally, TDD promotes a fast feedback cycle in which a test is written before the implementation. Moreover, each test is added to a test suite, which runs at every step in the TDD cycle. As a consequence, test-driven code is well tested and maintainable. Still, embedded software has some typical properties which impose challenges to apply the TDD cycle. Essentially, uploading software to target is generally too time-consuming to frequently run tests on target. Secondary issues are hardware dependencies and limited resources, such as memory footprint or processing power. In order to deal with these limitations, four methods have been identified and evaluated. Furthermore, a number of relevant design patterns are discussed to apply TDD in an embedded environment.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    All code snippets are based on the UnitTest++ framework.

  2. 2.

    CxxTest [32] is a C++ testing framework, which was written in Python.

  3. 3.

    This expression is included nevertheless, for the sake of completeness.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. KHBO Department of Industrial Engineering Science and Technology, Zeedijk 101, B-8400, Ostend, Belgium

    Piet Cordemans, Sille Van Landschoot & Jeroen Boydens

  2. KU Leuven Department of Computer Science, Celestijnenlaan 200A, B-3001, Leuven, Belgium

    Eric Steegmans

Authors
  1. Piet Cordemans
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  2. Sille Van Landschoot
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  3. Jeroen Boydens
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  4. Eric Steegmans
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Piet Cordemans .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology, Sharda University, Greater Noida, India

    Mohammad Ayoub Khan

  2. Department of Computer Sciences, Bahria University, Islamabad, Pakistan

    Saqib Saeed

  3. Faculty of Science, Helwan University, Cairo, Egypt

    Ashraf Darwish

  4. Scientific Network for Innovation and Research Excellence, Machine Intelligence Research Labs, Auburn, NY, USA

    Ajith Abraham

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© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Cordemans, P., Van Landschoot, S., Boydens, J., Steegmans, E. (2014). Test-Driven Development as a Reliable Embedded Software Engineering Practice . In: Khan, M., Saeed, S., Darwish, A., Abraham, A. (eds) Embedded and Real Time System Development: A Software Engineering Perspective. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 520. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40888-5_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40888-5_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-40887-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-40888-5

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