Re: Learning embedded coding, which uC?


Joerg wrote:
> Hello Lanarcam,
>
> > There are engineering practices that help to make sure
> > errors will be caught early, and that applies to all
> > engineering fields.
>
> Yes, and that includes documentation during the design process so you
> can hold proper and regular design reviews.
>
> > With software you must distinguish between design documents made
> > before you start coding and documentation you make afterward
> > to *explain*.
>
> I require one more: Documentation during the design. If an engineer
> doesn't want to do that I won't hire him or her. How else can you share
> ideas and strategies with the other team members, the QA folks and so on?
>
> > There is an analogy with the coding phase. If the language
> > has features that prevent bugs your code won't make harm
> > but this does not ensure it will be consistent with the
> > design.
>
> Language and tools can't prevent all hazards. They cannot know what the
> consequences of a certain failure are. A failure that may not at all be
> related to code but, say, to a long power glitch. Or a component
> failure. In my field the equipment must often still perform a graceful
> exit, pumps have to properly wind down, pressure needs to be maintained
> until xyz has been completed and so on. It is what aircraft folks call
> crash worthiness where a piece of equipment has to be controlled to some
> extent even after a major mishap or damage and must continue to protect
> people or property.

This is one of the differences between hardware and software. For
hardware you must take into account failure rates and have measures
to cope with fault modes. This is the object of safety analysis.

For software you can't use the failure rate analogy. Some have
proposed it but this is rejected by certification bodies. The
software must be proven, and this is theoreticaly possible
given some assumptions. The difficulty is that you can't prove
software by testing, this was discussed earlier, you must rely
on proven constructs. A language can help here.

This difficulty is recognized for the certification of software
and the process is evaluated as well as the software in itself.
But there is always a possibility that loopholes have been
overlooked unless you have a certified tool that writes the
code automatically from the specification.

.

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