Best Practices for Designing Safe Embedded Systems

The following is a summary of the major course topics and are not the section-by-subsection lecture breakdown.

System Partitioning for Designing Safe, Robust Systems

• Hardware / software partitioning
• Fault containment
• Real-time considerations

Run-Time Monitoring

• Power-on and run-time self tests
• Hard and soft errors
• CPU load monitoring

Design for Test

• Benefits
• Adding controllability and observability into a system
• Using test results to identify root causes of defects

Managing Time for Safe Product Operation

• Defining real-time systems
• Scheduling strategies
• Rate monotonic algorithm
• Schedulable bound
• CPU utilization
• Task priority assignment

Run-time Logging

• Benefits
• Logging strategies
• Configurability
• Timestamping
• Data exfiltration
• Real-world case study

Safety Case Requirements

• Benefits
• Essential components
• Safety case example
• Fault tree analysis (FTA)
• Failure modes & effects analysis (FMEA)

Managing Software Complexity

• Benefits
• Measuring techniques
• Techniques for reducing complexity
• Metrics, including McCabe Cyclomatic complexity

Coding Standards

• Benefits
• Coding standard rules to minimize code defects
• Introducing and enforcing coding standard rules
• Examples of prescriptive coding rules that reduce defects

Static Analysis

• Benefits
• Examples of defects caught only through static analysis
• Tool configuration
• Reducing false positives

Code Inspections

• Benefits
• Approaches to code inspections
• Metrics
• Best practices

Issue Tracking

• Benefits
• Best practices
• Data-driven planning

Post Mortems

• Benefits
• Understanding root causes of problems
• Identifying areas for improvement