Component-Based Embedded Software Engineering: Development Framework, Quality Assurance and a Generic Assessment Environment

Embedded software is used to control the functions of mechanical and physical devices by dedicated digital signal processor and computers. Nowadays, heterogeneous and collaborative embedded software systems are widely adopted to engage the physical world. To make such software extremely reliable, very efficient and highly flexible, component-based embedded software development can be employed for the complex embedded systems, especially those based on object-oriented (OO) approaches. In this paper, we introduce a component-based embedded software framework and the features it inherits. We propose a quality assurance (QA) model for component-based embedded software development, which covers both the component QA and the system QA as well as their interactions. Furthermore, we propose a generic quality assessment environment for component-based embedded systems: ComPARE. ComPARE can be used to assess real-life off-the-shelf components and to evaluate and validate the models selected for their evaluation. The overall component-based embedded systems can then be composed and analyzed seamlessly.