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Fault injection testing approaches assess the reliability of execution environments for critical software. They support the early testing of safety concepts that mitigate the impact of hardware failures on software behavior. The growing use of platform software for embedded systems raises the need to verify safety concepts that execute on top of operating systems and middleware platforms. Current fault injection techniques consider the resulting software stack as one black box and attempt to test the reaction of all components in the context of faults. This leads to very high software complexity and consequently requires a very high number of fault injection experiments. Testing the software components, such as control functions, operating systems, and middleware, individually would lead to a significant reduction of the number of experiments required. In this paper, we illustrate our novel approach for fault injection testing, which considers the components of a software stack, enables re-use of previously collected evidences, allows focusing testing on highly critical parts of the control software, and significantly lowers the number of experiments required.

Ad-hoc computer systems can automatically realize higher services when at least two distributed and communicating (embedded) devices come together. For this purpose, they must able to manage appearance and loss of devices and resources, and they have to adapt to changes in requirements and environment. Based on a component-oriented approach for adaptive ad-hoc systems, this paper suggests a high-level service quality reference model to advocate further research on the quality matching problem between service provider and client components.

Model-driven development has become an important engineering paradigm. It is said to have many advantages over traditional approaches, such as reuse or quality improvement, also for embedded systems. Along a similar line of argumentation, component-based software engineering is advocated. In order to investigate these claims, the MARMOT method was applied to develop several variants of a small micro-controller-based automotive subsystem. Several key figures, like model size and development effort were measured and compared with figures coming from two mainstream methods: the Unified Process and Agile Development. The analysis reveals that model-driven, component-oriented development performs well and leads to maintainable systems and a higher-than-normal reuse rate.

With the rapid rate of innovation in software engineering, teaching and learning of new technologies have become challenging issues. The provision of appropriate education is a key prerequisite for benefiting from new technologies. Experience shows that typical classroom education is not as effective and efficient as it could be. E-learning approaches seem to be a promising solution but e-learning holds problems such as a lack of social communication or loose control on learning progress. This chapter describes a blended learning approach that mixes traditional classroom education with e-learning and that makes use of tightly integrated coaching activities. The concrete effects and enabling factors of this approach are discussed by means of an industrial case study. The results of the study indicate that following a blended learning approach has a positive impact on learning time, effectiveness and sustainability.

Model-based and component-oriented software development approaches are slowly superseding traditional ways of developing embedded systems. For investigating to which extent model-based development is feasible for embedded system development, we conducted a case study in which a small embedded system is developed using the MARMOT approach. In order to evaluate the degree of reuse that might be achieved, the components of the case study are used in the context of different small projects. Several aspects of reuse, application size, ease of adaptation, and development effort are quantified. This analysis reveals that model-based and component-oriented development performs well for small embedded systems, and it leads to the conclusion that model-driven/component-based development of embedded systems enables adaptable applications with higherthan- normal reuse rate. Preprint accepted for publication in 33rd EUROMICRO Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications, 2007, IEEE Computer Society.

The potential benefits of component-based development are as attractive in the domain of embedded systems as they are in other areas of the software industry. These include reductions in development times and costs, improved quality and specialization of expertise. However, these benefits are much more difficult to realize in embedded systems development than in other areas of software engineering because the problems of composing extra-functional requirements such as quality, reliability and performance are much more acute. When building new applications from existing components it is not only necessary to ensure that they behave as expected, but also that these extra-functional properties are composed correctly. Until recently it was difficult to do this in an economically viable way, but recent trends have combined to make component-based software engineering as imperative for embedded systems development as it is in other domains.