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Category Archives: Testing
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 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.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 3 Optimising software to use cache - November 5, 2020
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 2 Cache Replacement Policy - October 22, 2020
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 1 Cache Basics - October 15, 2020
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 […]
Posted in Agile, C/C++ Programming, Testing
Tagged C++, C++11, Catch2, Compiler Explorer, doctest, GoogleTest, Modern C++, Testing
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Celebrating 10 years – my top 10 blog articles
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.
He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Latest posts by Glennan Carnie (see all)
- Practice makes perfect, part 3 – Idiomatic kata - February 27, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 2– foundation kata - February 13, 2020
- Practice makes perfect, part 1 – Code kata - January 30, 2020
It’s difficult to believe we’ve been writing articles for 10 years. In that time I’ve written over 90 technical articles on C, C++ and embedded system design.
To celebrate I’ve picked my ‘Top 10’ articles, with a little background into why I enjoyed writing them so much, or the story behind them.
So, sit back, cue up “At the Sign of the Swinging Cymbal“* and enjoy.
(* This really dates
Posted in C/C++ Programming, Design Issues, Testing, UML
Tagged arrays, casting, forwarding, Modern C++. C++11. C++14, move semantics, priority, Testing, unit test
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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 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.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 3 Optimising software to use cache - November 5, 2020
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 2 Cache Replacement Policy - October 22, 2020
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 1 Cache Basics - October 15, 2020
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 […]
Python 3 Type Hints
Associate Instructor at Feabhas Ltd
An independent IT trainer Martin has over 40 years academic and commercial experience in open systems software engineering. He has worked with a range of technologies from real time process controllers, through compilers, to large scale parallel processing systems; and across multiple sectors including industrial systems, semi-conductor manufacturing, telecomms, banking, MoD, and government.
Latest posts by Martin Bond (see all)
- Python 3 File Paths - May 2, 2019
- Python 3 Unicode and Byte Strings - February 21, 2019
- Python 3 Type Hints - February 8, 2019
The expected end of support for Python 2.7 is 1st January 2020, at least according to Guido van Rossum’s blog post. Starting now, you should consider developing all new Python applications in Python 3, and migrating existing code to Python 3 as and when time and workload permit.
Moving to Python 3
If you are unaware of the changes introduced in Python 3 that broke backward compatibility with Python 2 then there is a good summary on this What’s New In Python […]
Posted in Python, Python3, Testing
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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 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.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 3 Optimising software to use cache - November 5, 2020
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 2 Cache Replacement Policy - October 22, 2020
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 1 Cache Basics - October 15, 2020
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 […]
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 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.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 3 Optimising software to use cache - November 5, 2020
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 2 Cache Replacement Policy - October 22, 2020
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 1 Cache Basics - October 15, 2020
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 […]
Posted in Agile, C/C++ Programming, General, Testing
Tagged cyclomatic complexity, McCabe, Static Analysis
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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 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.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 3 Optimising software to use cache - November 5, 2020
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 2 Cache Replacement Policy - October 22, 2020
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 1 Cache Basics - October 15, 2020
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 […]
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 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.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 3 Optimising software to use cache - November 5, 2020
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 2 Cache Replacement Policy - October 22, 2020
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 1 Cache Basics - October 15, 2020
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 […]
An Introduction to Docker for Embedded Developers – Part 3 Cross-Compiling for Cortex-M
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 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.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 3 Optimising software to use cache - November 5, 2020
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 2 Cache Replacement Policy - October 22, 2020
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 1 Cache Basics - October 15, 2020
In the previous posting we looked at defining a custom Dockerfile where we can add specific tools (and their dependencies). From that we created a Docker image and this allowed us to build C/C++ code in a Docker container, ensuring a consistent build environment.
So far we have to build all our code using the native GCC toolchain which is part of the base Docker image (gcc:7.2). However, I want to be able to build an image I can download and run […]
An Introduction to Docker for Embedded Developers – Part 1 Getting Started
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 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.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 3 Optimising software to use cache - November 5, 2020
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 2 Cache Replacement Policy - October 22, 2020
- Introduction to the ARM® Cortex®-M7 Cache – Part 1 Cache Basics - October 15, 2020
Docker is a relatively new technology, only appearing just over four years ago. The core building blocks have always been part of Unix; but the significant support, Linux containers (LCX), first appeared back in 2008.
Initially Docker was only supported on Linux, but more recently native support for OSX (my development OS of choice) and Windows (albeit Windows 10 Pro) suddenly opens up some interesting workflow choices.
The “What”
So, first, what is Docker? I’m always trying to find the right words here […]
Posted in Agile, Design Issues, Testing
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