One important realization on the journey from a BDUF approach to an iterative and agile approach is that design is never done. Designs evolve. The waterfall emphasis has been to unnaturally try to control software physics by imposing requirements freezes and burdensome change control. The process of developing software is part science and part creative. You are applying science toward the invention of something. Design is capturing knowledge both about what the end user need is, and one solution to that need.
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Tag Archives: Embedded
Don’t Let Embedded Tool Chain Slow You Down.
During my TDD session at the Embedded Systems Conference yesterday, I did a demo. Before the demo, I make the case for TDD as a way to prevent bugs (see Physics of TDD). For the live demo I usually code on my mac and run the tests there as well. The question always comes up: “You are running tests on your PC, can you run them on the target?” or maybe “Sure you can TDD on a PC, but what about the real hardware?”
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Deep Agile Embedded Brain Storm
Let’s say you were an embedded systems developer, and you were planning on attending a conference like the Deep Agile Embedded.
What questions would you hope you could get answers for at the conference?
What if you already knew it all but were sending your boss, co-worker, or CEO who needed to learn more, what would you want them to hear about?
Would you want to do some hands on Test Driven Development?
Here are some of the questions we have so far:
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Now I’ll really use test driven development to write device driver code
In the last article, I added tests to existing code. So I did not really do Test Driven Development. I did Test After Development. Let’s do some TDD now and design the block erase function. I’ll go from the spec, to the test to the code.
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Who says you can’t test drive a device driver?
I keep hearing that you can’t write unit tests for device drivers. I don’t believe that’s true. To disprove this claim, I thought I would find a device driver and write some unit tests for it. This blog posting shows what device driver unit tests look line.