Testing and traceability play a vital role
in embedded product development. Traceability rendered via Application
Life-cycle Management (ALM) software enables the team to automatically generate
networking cases that link back to requirements, and report defects that link
back to test cases. By knowing that defects are addressed and test cases run
successfully, the team can have an immediate networking and accurate accounting
of the state of product requirements.
Fifteen or 20 years ago, many embedded
systems consisted of an 8-bit processor with a few KB of memory and perhaps a
couple hundred lines of networking. Today, the explosion of embedded systems in
automobiles, ATMs, cell phones, and other devices has dramatically changed that
dynamic. It’s not uncommon to see multiple 32- and 64-bit multicore processors
on an Ethernet network, running multiple applications totaling hundreds of
thousands of lines of code in these systems.
