On the Use of Software Quality Metrics to Improve Physical Properties of Embedded Systems

As software production achieves a growing importance in the embedded systems world, quality evaluation of embedded software and its impact on physical properties of embedded systems becomes increasingly relevant. Although there are tools for embedded software design that improve software specification and verification, we are still short of a tool that supports the designer’s decisions on the best design strategy regarding low level, physical characteristics like performance, energy, and memory footprint, which are critical in the embedded domain. In this paper, we provide an analysis of the correlation between software quality metrics and physical metrics for embedded software. By means of experiments, we investigate the impact of software engineering best practices on embedded software and show that software quality metrics can be used to guide design decisions toward improving physical properties of embedded systems.