Our primary job, as QA and testing professionals, is to find defects in software builds.  Fortunately, however, most of us have moved beyond exposing and tracking bugs to the more critical role of ensuring that the software our companies deliver meets customer expectations before it is released.  To do this, many organisations have recently embraced requirements-based testing (RBT). 

TE Systems’ RapidiTTy IDE provides a self-contained environment for developers who wish to create “time-triggered” microcontroller software in order to improve overall system reliability.  RapidiTTy is intended to address deeply-embedded applications including control and monitoring operations in medical, defence, automotive and industrial sectors, as well as in white and brown goods.

etailers live and die based on their optimal supply chains. Industrial manufacturers depend on streamlined supply chains to build products.  Likewise, manufacturers of electronic products - such as mobile handsets, consumer electronics, communications equipment, and other intelligent devices - rely heavily on distributed developers, outsourcers, software vendors, and even open source. Then, why not treat this software ecosystem as an embedded software supply chain and try to optimise it?

Relatively few commercial successes emerge from the primordial soup of the R&D department. When they do, commercial imperatives usually lead to the rapid evolution of ideas into a wide range of sub-species, or variants. These imperatives will require improvements, modifications and tweaks to win new customers or to keep existing customers happy. A proliferation in variants can run across many dimensions including operating system, CPU, local language, application, user, and so on.

Having the right tools to control who has access to what has never been more important – both from an operational and a legal point of view. In the old days of dumb terminals, protecting applications and data wasn’t so daunting. To secure an application, an administrator simply limited access, confining users to a set of menu options.

he critical build and release stage of application development offers perhaps the greatest promise for improving embedded development today.  Starting in the 1980s with the availability of the first commercial software development tools, the natural starting point for companies to address software development problems was with front-end activities like source-code control, editors, debuggers, and bug trackers.