Category Archives: Agile

GitHub Codespaces and online development

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

In our previous posting, we discussed using VSCode’s Dev Container extension to allow running workspaces directly within a Docker container.

In December 2020, I was granted early access to a new feature developed by GitHub called Codespaces. Codespaces offers an online VSCode development environment, enabling you to develop entirely in the cloud.

The great news is that Codespaces uses the same core process, and file structure, as Dev Containers; meaning once we have our .devcontainer folder setup (if you are unfamiliar with […]

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VSCode, Dev Containers and Docker: moving software development forward

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

Long term readers of this blog will know our devotion to using container-based technology, especially Docker, to significantly improve software quality through repeatable builds.

In the Autumn/fall of 2020, Microsoft introduced a Visual Studio Code (VSCode) extension Remote – Containers. With one quick stroke, this extension allows you to open a VSCode project within a Docker container.

Getting started with Dev Containers and Docker

There are several different approaches to using Dev Containers. In this post, we shall cover three options:

Using an existing […]

Posted in Agile, C/C++ Programming, Testing | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

TDD with Compiler Explorer

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

Compiler Explorer (CE) has been around for several years now. When it first appeared on the scene, it immediately became an invaluable tool. Its ability to show generated assembler from given source code across many different compilers and ISAs (Instruction Set Architectures) is “mind-blowing”. We use it extensively when teaching as it allows you to clarify the effect your code can have on both performance and memory usage. 

However, rather than limiting itself to only showing generated assembler, recent developments include the […]

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Using a Raspberry Pi as a remote headless J-Link Server

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

Here at Feabhas we tend to favour using Segger J-Link’s as our ‘go-to’ solution for target flashing and debug, as they fall into that category of tools that just work.

As part of our ongoing work around Agile and CI (Continuous Integration), we’re always interested in addressing that challenging step of automating target based test in a cost-effective manner.

The Raspberry Pi (RPi) is a ubiquitous low-cost platform for numerous tasks. One useful tasks that it can be used for is as […]

Posted in Agile, ARM, C/C++ Programming, Testing | Tagged , , | 11 Comments

Register for our webinar – ‘Introduction to Docker”Introduction to Docker’

Dec 5, 2018 at 10am BST & 4pm BST
The introduction to Docker series is proving popular with our Blog readers, so we have decided to make it the subject for our next webinar.

Docker is a relatively new technology, only appearing just over five years ago. It has become integral to modern continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery in an Agile world.

In this 45 minute webinar, presented by Niall Cooling, he will introduce Docker and how it can be used in an […]

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An Introduction to Docker for Embedded Developers – Part 5 Multi-Stage Builds

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

Following on from the previous post, where we spent time reducing the docker image size, in this post I’d like to cover a couple of useful practices to further improve our docker image:

Copying local files rather than pulling from the web
Simplifying builds using a multi-stage build

Copying in Local Files

So far, when installing the GCC-Arm compiler, we have pulled it from the web using wget. This technique can suffer from two issues:

Web links are notoriously fragile
https adds complexity to the packages […]

Posted in Agile, ARM, C/C++ Programming, Testing | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Code Quality – Cyclomatic Complexity

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

In the standard ISO 26262-6:2011 [1] the term “complexity” appears a number of times, generally in the context of reducing or lowering said complexity.

There are many different ways of defining “complexity”, for example, Fred Brooks, in his 1986 landmark paper, “No Silver Bullet — Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering” asserts that there are two types of complexity; Essential and Accidental. [2]

Rather than getting into esoteric discussion about design complexity, I’d like to focus on code complexity.

Over the years, I […]

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Setting up Sublime Text to build your project

Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.

He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Glennan Carnie

For many years embedded development was dominated by complex integrated development environments (IDEs) that hide away all the nasty, messy details of a typical embedded software project.

Recently, with the rapidly accelerating adoption of agile techniques in embedded systems, there has been a move away from integrated development environments towards smaller, simpler, individual tools.  Tools like CMake, Rake and SCons are used to manage build configurations.  Container facilities like Docker provide lightweight environments for build and test.  And developers are free […]

Posted in Agile, C/C++ Programming, General | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Bugs do matter…(unsurprisingly)

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

Welcome to 2018! How did that happen?

Thank you to everyone who attended last week’s webinar on “Measuring Software Quality“, and thank you for the positive feedback, it really does help us shape our future webinars/blogs.

During the talk, I discussed a suggestion by Sally Globe,  along the lines of “Bugs don’t matter”/”Perfect software is the enemy of rapid deployment” as long as you are “Not wrong long”, which came from an initial exchange on Twitter back last year:The caveat was this […]

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An Introduction to Docker for Embedded Developers – Part 4 Reducing Docker Image Size

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

In Part 3  we managed to build a Docker image containing the tools required to compile and link C/C++ code destined for our embedded Arm target system. However, we’ve paid little attention to the size of the image. Doing a quick Docker image listing we can see its grown to a whopping 2.14GB:

$ docker image ls
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID […]

Posted in Agile, ARM, C/C++ Programming, Cortex, Testing | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments