On Tue, 28 Aug 2012 10:35:46 -0400, John Kasunich wrote: > On Tue, Aug 28, 2012, at 01:50 AM, EBo wrote: >> Well, I am a strong proponent of eXtreme Programming (XP) and >> similar >> Test Driven Development (TDD) methodologies. They can be overdone >> though... >> >> The nice thing about these discussions is that we could use them to >> start to develop an automated test suite and work away on various >> parts >> until the tests succeed (the XP approach). Even if you tare the >> code >> base down and start over again the test suite provides its own >> resource. >> In addition, when you move from one platform to another you can use >> this as a base level test to verify that it is working as expected. >> >> So I would agree lets blue sky this puppy, but lets start small... > > I want to raise a red flag about XP and other test driven development > methods. They work fine for deterministic situations, but you can't > use testing to prove the absence of race conditions and other rare > bugs that can occur when doing realtime programming. It is very > easy to write code that will work fine until one instance of the > program happens to interrupt another during that single line of code > that isn't properly re-entrant. Said interrupt may happen once a > year, or less, and testing will never find it. > > Realtime stuff needs to be designed like hardware, not software. > Hardware engineers have long and expensive prototyping cycles, so > they do their absolute best to get it right and know it is right. > > ...
I never said that XP would solve every problem (such as race conditions) and should never be used as a replacement for working though the problems, but can handle the vase majority of the code base. As a note, I once developed a testing suite that ran a regression test suite on embedded hardware via the jtag using gdb, and set appropriate break points so that I could verify that real-time events were handled as expected. So, you can do some wickedly weird testing this way, but you are correct, it will not handle everything. EBo -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
