Subj : Re: Not debugging?
To   : comp.programming,comp.lang.java.programmer,comp.lang.lisp
From : Phlip
Date : Thu Aug 25 2005 04:16 pm

Greg Menke wrote:

>> You describe a legacy situation - someone else invented this bizarro
>> hardware, and legacy situations require debugging to learn their
>> characteristics.
>
> No I don't.  I describe a realtime system- or even a simple device
> driver.  There are lots of those, new and old.

The define "legacy" as "requires debugging".

> Say you wrote some subsystem on this embedded system, and you
> implemented some kind of test framework to help you get it as
> functionally debugged as possible.  What you've tested is your inputs,
> outputs and algorithms work in an fairly abstract and simplistic
> situation.  Thats helpful for first order easy debugging, but you're
> going to be doing it the hard way along with everybody else once the
> software is on the hardware and some of the unknown idiosyncracies of
> the system start showing up.  More of the unknown idiosyncracies will
> appear over time.  And at this stage, your emulator is pretty much
> useless because nobody cares about what it says when the real thing is
> sitting in the lab & thats were the bugs are.

This sounds like the code went through an emulation phase and then a real 
thing phase.

Ideally, I would configure one button on my editor to run all tests against 
the emulator, then run all possible tests against the hardware. If the code 
fails in the hardware I would trivially attempt to upgrade the emulator to 
match the fault, so the code also fails with the emulator. But this is 
speculation, and of course it won't prevent the need to debug against the 
hardware.

Realistically, you are apparently relentlessly testing, and admittedly in a 
"legacy" situation that prevents you from using tests to make the hardware 
more bug resistant. Carry on!

-- 
  Phlip
  http://www.greencheese.org/ZeekLand  <-- NOT a blog!!!

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