AEP - Automatic Exchange of Embedded System Software Parameters

The process of debugging embedded system software is a non-trivial task that consumes a lot of time, once it needs a thorough inspection of the entire source code to make sure that there is no behavior beyond expectations. Coding and testing embedded systems software, timing and hardware is even more defiant, once developers need to find out how to optimize the use of the scarce resources since the test itself will compete with the application under test by the scarce system resources. Also, both run in proper platforms, that depends on operating systems, architecture, vendors, debugging tool, etc. This makes embedded systems more susceptible to errors as well as specification failures. This paper presents AEP, a tool to help developers in the process of debugging embedded systems. The main idea of this tool is emulating various possible system configuration to try to find errors in the application. An XML file contains all required information to perform automated compilation, emulation and debugging, and there is no need of human interference. The evaluation of AEP was in terms of memory consumption and time to perform debugging. The obtained results indicate that even with no previous information this tool can produce helpful data for developers to find and fix bugs.