Embedded.com Tech Focus Newsletter (12-1-14): Assuring the software quality of nextgen embedded designs

To achieve the software quality assurance that today's challenging embedded systems require involves using every means and tool available, from testing and static analysis to metrics collection and requirements planning.

QA is not supposed to find bugs.

Deepti Sharma outlines what she thinks are the ten essential elements in delivering a high quality software design to a customer.

Peter Mueller provides five reasons why embedded developers should know more about statecharts and how that knowledge can be used to ensure software quality.

Long used mainly in high integrity environments, new unit test tools can now also streamline and improve the quality and reliability of mainstream, less critical environments, even those involving undocumented legacy code.

Engineering is about numbers; firmware people need to collect metrics.

We need requirements, and must spend more energy gathering them.

How to collate and assess the masses of information created by a Simulink based model of an automotive software system and come up with reliable software assurance ratings of the code generated.

A general software quality model that describes very different concepts related to quality and integrates them with the various concepts found in standards, guidelines, and static code checkers

How the use of a Measurement based Software Quality Assurance Framework (MSQF) can be used to eliminate the bias and errors inherent in experience-only based quality assurance.

Jack Ganssle's guide to doing software development in a disciplined way to reduce both errors and the time it takes to complete a project. Part 1: Any idiot can write code.

In an excerpt from their book Embedded System Security, the authors assess the role of C and C++ coding standards and how compliance leads to more secure code. development.

In the age of open source and large scale outsourcing, software quality assurance must also include procedures for ascertaining its legal compliance. Here is a guide to starting that process.