****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
The author addresses what one might call fully responsible engineering of software-controlled systems, end-to-end, hands-on, with special attention to design verification and all types of testing. Some of the materials are based on his excellent articles in Electronic Design. The book is well-written, direct, practical, and engaging. Among its valuable features:• Complete examples – small yet fully worked out design/code examples and counterexamples that instantly dispel doubt or argument. For example, the simple 2-threaded program in Figure 5.4, referenced many times in the book, proves that software CAN and DOES fail randomly, counter to what many people and standards assume.• Standards guidance – scores of citations in ISO/IEC 14971, 26262, 29119, 61508, 62304 and so forth, e.g. “Table 8 of ISO 26262-6 bans recursion completely” while “paragraph C.2.6.7 of IEC 61508-7” says only that recursion depth must be bounded, as it automatically is in tail recursion (though only with respect to stack size, not iteration count).• Methods guidance – the best short introduction to formal design-validation methods l've seen, including a working example for the SPIN tool. (I personally think Verum’s Dezyne tool is on the right road to bringing these formal methods into mainstream use.)• Languages and tools guidance – many were new to me, e.g. D and RUST languages, KLEE and gcov tools for code coverage, Sparse and Astrée for static analysis, SWIFT for fault injection.• Useful references listed at the end of each chapter – for example, the ACM paper titled “How Amazon Web Services Uses Formal Methods” (Commun. ACM, Jan. 2015) that introduces the phrase “exhaustively testable pseudo-code”. Amazon web services seem far distant from embedded, but key challenges at the module and subsystem level are the same: completeness and correctness of logic that manages states and communications.• Gems – my favorites are Anecdote 5 about confirmation bias, Fallacy 4 about failure probabilities in composite systems, Anecdote 25 about being convinced by KLEE, and being introduced to Laurent Bossavit's "Leprechauns of Software Engineering".The digital version is a facsimile of the print version. I read over half of the book on Google Play, where I was first able to access it, then finished it on Kindle. I found Kindle much easier on the eyes and smoother overall. There are some hard-to-read rotated diagrams, e.g. Figures 12.1 and 15.5.(Context and disclosure: I designed and coded industrial products for 20 years in C/C++/Java/etc on UNIX/Windows/etc, then managed and consulted for 15 years most recently in safety-critical medical devices. I’m not an embedded expert, but I do consider myself expert in how to build reliable software. I have no financial interest in this book or in any tools mentioned in this review. I know the author slightly via a few emails.)
