Last 10th of July I presented for the first time my talk named 'Unembedding embedded systems with TDD. Benefits of going beyond the Make It Work phase' as part of the First International Test-Driven Development Conference.
Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a development technique that facilitates software developers to face the 'Make It Right' development phase safely just after they've successfully completed the 'Make It Work' phase (that is, we have already gone from 'Red' to 'Green' TDD phases).
Once we are on the 'Make It Right' (TDD's 'Refactor' phase) is when we are able to focus all our energy on engineer our code right, iteratively and incrementally, to properly manage its dependencies. In other words, is when we drive our code to have the appropriate architecture to be portable, easy to change and evolve.
Portable Embedded Architecture guided by tests
Here you can see an schematic representation of the architectural layers we end up to have in order to accomplish the above mentioned objectives:
To accomplish that we need to use, among other things, advanced programming language features. Doing this in embedded is orders of magnitude harder than in non embedded. TDD allows us to drive our code through them, step by step, while assuring both the cross compiler and the underlying processor keep working as expected (i.e., we do not enter undesirably into the 'Red' phase).
-
- If you are not an embedded developer, do you think you write some kind of firmware?. Spoiler: probably you do
- If you are not an embedded developer, do you think you write some kind of firmware?. Spoiler: probably you do
You can find answers to these and other interesting questions inside the talk. Major roadblocks to overcome and how to remove them are presented. Somehow, it represents a kind of resume of all the topics covered during my 'Unembedding Embedded Systems' course.
Below you have a direct link to the talk and you can find its slides here.