Better Embedded System Software: The Book

The book is available from Amazon.  Here's a description:  http://koopman.us/index.html


Book Summary

This book distills the experience of more than 90 design reviews on real embedded system products into a set of bite-size lessons learned in the areas of software development process, requirements, architecture, design, implementation, verification & validation, and critical system properties. Each chapter describes an area that tends to be a problem in embedded system design, symptoms that tend to indicate you need to make changes, the risks of not fixing problems in this area, and concrete ways to make your embedded system software better. Each chapter is relatively self-sufficient, permitting developers with a busy schedule to cherry-pick the best ideas to make their systems better right away.

Click on the link for chapter 19 on Global Variables to see the free sample chapter

Chapters:

1. Introduction
   
   Software Development Process
2. Written development plan
3. How much paper is enough?
4. How much paper is too much?
   
   Requirements & Architecture
5. Written requirements
6. Measureable requirements
7. Tracing requirements to test
8. Non-functional requirements
9. Requirement churn
10. Software architecture
11. Modularity
    
    Design
12. Software design
13. Statecharts and modes
14. Real time
15. User interface design
    
    Implementation
16. How much assembly language is enough?
17. Coding style
18. The cost of nearly full resources
19. Global variables are evil
20. Mutexes and data access concurrency
    
    Verification & Validation
21. Static checking and compiler warnings
22. Peer reviews
23. Testing and test plans
24. Issue tracking & analysis
25. Run-time error logs
    
    Critical System Properties
26. Dependability
27. Security
28. Safety
29. Watchdog timers
30. System reset
31. Conclusions

Click Here To View Detailed Table of Contents
(Requires Acrobat Reader version 8 or higher)

Click here for errata list.


-----