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Observations from Uppsala Computer Simulation, Virtual Platforms, Embedded Programming, Multicore and More (by Jakob Engblom)

Category Archives: Testing

Wind River Blog: Forcing Rare Bugs to Appear using Simics

2012 May 3 10:59 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how a team of researchers at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln is using Simics to force rare bugs to manifest themselves as errors. They used Simics to control a target system to force it into rare situations much more likely to trigger latent bugs, requiring far fewer test runs compared to just randomly rerunning tests again and again and hoping to see a bug.

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Posted in: testing, virtual platforms, Wind River Blog / Tagged: Simics, University of Nebraska at Lincoln

Wind River Blog: Fault Injection with Simics

2012 January 23 22:57 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how you actually do fault injection in Simics. This particular post is pretty detailed, showing the actual architecture of a fault injector in Simics, not just “yes you can do it”. It includes actual diagrams of system components and how you can insert fault injection into an existing system, so it is a bit more technical than most my Wind River blog posts that tend to be more conceptual.

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Posted in: testing, Wind River Blog / Tagged: fault injection, Simics

Fujitsu Server Fault Injection Robot

2011 December 11 22:53 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

Fault Injection is a topic that has fascinated me for a long time. Not just the area of software-to-software fault injection, but more so how you inject faults into hardware using hardware (and how to conveniently approximate this using a simulator). I just stumbled on a short interesting note about such hardware-actuated fault injection in a Fujitsu article.

Read More →

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Posted in: computer architecture, testing / Tagged: fault injection, fujitsu, Masafumi Matsuo, server, Yuichi Kurita, Yuji Uchiyama

Wind River Blog: Interview with a Networked Simics User

2011 November 16 17:58 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

There is a new post at my Wind River blog, an interview with Dan Poirot at RTI who is using Simics to model and test heterogeneous, distributed, networked systems.

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Posted in: testing, virtual platforms, Wind River Blog / Tagged: Dan Poirot, RTI, Simics

Wind River Blog: Working Smarter, not Harder

2011 February 24 15:16 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how you can use a virtual platform to complete work faster. Not by making the virtual platform execution of target code faster, but by optimizing the way you work and taking advantage of the features of a virtual platform.

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Posted in: embedded systeme, testing, virtual machines, Wind River Blog

Product Holes: Microsoft Office vs Internet Explorer

2010 October 22 11:05 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

There seems to be no shortage of bugs that “should have been obvious” and subject to the “how can you not check that your own products work together” phenomenon. Just the other day, I stumbled on another one. This time, it was the Microsoft set of applications and operating systems that do not quite work together the way you would expect them to.

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Posted in: desktop software, programming, testing / Tagged: Microsoft, office 2007, Windows

Product Holes: Greatest Hits break iPod Cover Flow

2010 July 18 20:20 / 3 Comments / Jakob

Following on my previous posts about broken phone browsers, phones, and cars, here is another case of “why didn’t they catch this in testing?”

We recently got ourselves an iPod Touch, to entertain our oldest child on long trips. It is a brilliant device in many ways, I can understand why people love their iPhones (even though I am very happy with the very different style of the Blackberry phone that I was given by my employer). However, I have found one weird behavior in the music player that leaves me wondering how it got through into the shipping product.

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Posted in: gadgets, programming, testing / Tagged: Billy Idol, Bruce Springsteen, coverflow, iPhone, iPod, Robbie Williams

Product Holes: Tesla Roadster & iPhone 4

2010 July 17 12:57 / Leave a Comment / Jakob

Continuing on the thread from my previous post about the testing of products that fail to find problems that become obvious to (some) users after a very short time, I just read an article (in Swedish) about how the famed Tesla roadster cars behaved when they were confronted with Scandinavian winters.

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Posted in: gadgets, programming, testing, transportation / Tagged: bug, cars, iPhone, software testing, Tesla, testing

Poking Holes in Products

2010 June 14 10:42 / 3 Comments / Jakob

I recently started using a new mobile phone, a Blackberry Bold 9700. I am a bit ambivalent on some of its design features, but it is certainly a very different device from the much more friendly SonyEricsson I had before. Like anybody would do, I have been playing around with it to see what it can do and what not (notable things not working: the “AppWorld” application store is not available in Sweden, YouTube videos do not play in any way that I can figure out).

And almost inevitably, as you play around with a complex modern piece of software (which is what most of the phone is, after all), you find some obvious things which are just plain broken. You wonder, “why didn’t they think of this”, and “how could this ever escape testing?” My current best example is that the built-in web browser does not render the pages from Blackberry’s own support knowledgebase.

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Posted in: embedded software, embedded systeme, programming, testing / Tagged: Blackberry, bug, software testing

Recent Posts

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  • Everything in the Cloud?
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  • Off-Topic: Moving Bad Piggies Save Games
  • Two Cores, Four Cores, Eight Cores – Mobile Variety
  • Bliss: Failing to Pivot for Ideology
  • Wind River Blog and Movie: Demo of Simics Debugging
  • Simulation vs Reality in Schlock Mercenary
  • Programming like Lego
  • Does ISA Matter for Performance?
  • Wind River Blog: Debugging Simics using Simics
  • Wind River Blog: Simics and Flying Piggies
  • Dragons can be Useful – when AT Models Make Sense

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