Engineers and Programmers, Stop Writing So Much Firmware

(this article is not just for embedded developers)

A few months back I was reading Doug Schmidt’s blog, on The Growing Importance of Sustaining Software for the DoD, and he made the claim

“although software does not wear out, firmware and hardware become obsolete, thereby requiring software modifications”.

It was a bit of a clarifying moment for me. Doug clarified two terms that I suppose were obvious, or maybe not. Software is this thing that can have a long useful life, where firmware is going to be regularly be made obsolete as hardware evolves.

I’d like to add to Doug’s statement:

although software does not wear out, it can be destroyed from within by unmanaged dependencies on firmware and hardware.

Think of all the code denied the potential long life of software due to being infected with dependencies on hardware.
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Accessing static Data and Functions in Legacy C — Part 2

Maybe you read Part 1 of this article. If you did you’ll know it concerns adding tests to legacy code (legacy code is code without tests). You will also know that the code has file scope functions and data that we want to test directly.

My opinion on accessing private parts of well designed code, is that you do not need to. You can test well design code through its public interface. Take it as a sign that the design is deteriorating when you cannot find a way to fully test a module through its public interface.

Part 1 showed how to #include the code under test in the test file to gain access to the private parts, a pragmatic thing to do when wrestling untested code into a test harness. This article shows another technique that may have an advantage for you over the technique shown in Part 1. Including the code under test in a test case can only be done once in a test build. What if you need access to the hidden parts in two test cases? You can’t. That causes multiple definition errors at link time.

This article shows how to create a test access adapter to overcome that problem.
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Accessing static Data and Functions in Legacy C — Part 1

And a Happy Leap Year Bug

It’s a new year; last year was a leap year; so the quadrennial reports of leap year bugs are coming in. Apologies are in the press from Apple, TomTom, and Microsoft. Trains we stopped from running in China. Somehow calling them glitches seems to make it someone else’s fault, something out of their control. How long have leap years been around? Julius Caesar introduced Leap Years in the Roman empire over 2000 years ago. The Gregorian calendar has been around since 1682. This is not a new idea, or a new bug.

I’m going to try to take one excuse away from the programmers that create these bugs by answering a question that comes up all the time, “How do I test static functions in my C code?”
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