Software Engineering Institute

This article was published by the DACS Journal of Software Technology in January 2010.

Embedded systems are safety-critical and mission-critical systems that have become increasingly software-intensive - with millions of lines of code executing on a distributed networked set of processors. Developing such systems has indeed been shown to be increasingly challenging as embedded software subsystems compete for computer system resources and face unpredictable interaction behavior due to the time-sensitive nature of the application. The cost of developing the software for an aircraft has become unaffordable – reaching $10B or more. If we can discover a reasonable percentage of these late system-level faults earlier in the development process, we can expect considerable cost savings.