Testing Tools For Embedded Systems Research

In the fast-changing world of embedded, handheld and wireless devices, there are many hardware and software design changes taking place, and the embedded software testing is more necessary. Coverage testing and performance analysis is the important testing technique of the embedded software in the embedded development environment. So, it's meaning to develop embedded software testing tools.The development environment of the general software is the same as the running environment. It's simply to collecting the run-time information in this environment. You can store the data in a data file or send the data directly to testing tools by some kind of inter-process communications. The most important difference between embedded software development and general software development is the embedded software needs cross development: the development tools are running on the host machine and the embedded application is running on the target machine which is relatively short of resources. The testing tools for embedded software have the same question: the testing tools are running on the host machine, but the runtime information needed by the tools is generated on the target machine, so there should be some physic/logic connections between the host and the target machine for data transfer. So the effective data transfer method must be taken into account during the design of the embedded testing tool to upload data and reduce the intrusion to the target system as many as possible.Most performance tools make minor additions and modifications to the measured program. These changes add small bits of code (known as instrumentation code) to record the execution of program events or to collect and record data. Inserting instrumentation code in a program is an effective technique for measuring many aspects of program performance. The instrumentation code can be added at any stage of the compilation process by system tools such as the compiler or linker or by external tools that are part of a measurement system. But no matter which method is chosen, the intrusion to the embedded application is in existence. Because of the real-time requirement of some embedded software, the instrument method should be taken into account carefully to reduce the intrusion to the embedded application during the design of the embedded testing tool.I got interest with embedded system several years ago and do some research job in area of embedded software testing and performance analysis. Then I implemented a simple performance analysis and coverage analysis tool on the embedded software development platform - DeltaSystem of CoreTek Systems, Inc. Based on these facts, the thesis demonstrates the architecture and internals of the profiling and coverage analysis tools on embedded systems.