1) Ease Transition to a Model-Based Software Development Process
2) Identify the right tools for your Company
a. Identify tools that are often overlooked when first moving to a
model-based process
3) Help get your money’s worth from existing tools
a. Ex 1: Seven usage scenarios for automatic test generation tools
b. Ex 2: Modeling style guide that allows the autocode to be tested by
an auto test tool
4) Create custom tools to better integrate commercial tools
5) Create custom tools for process steps with no available commercial
tools
6) Create training materials
a. Including documentation materials as many tool’s built-in documentation
could be better
Example Success Stories
1)
Automatic Model Preparation for Automatic Test Tool
a. Script prepares model to be used with Reactis (second script for
use with T-VEC)
b. Reduces prep time to min.
2)
Automatic Regression Test Suite for New MATLAB Releases
a. Checks if Simulink/Stateflow behavior is the same
b. Checks if ERT code has changed for all Simulink blocks and
Stateflow constructs
c. Checks if Reactis still accepts all the ERT test models
d. Reduced regression test time from days to min.
3)
Automatic Style Guide Checker Tool
a. Created custom checks to enforce company’s model style
b. Eliminated error prone and time consuming task of manual reviews
4)
Automatic Test Generation Tool
a. Reduced test generation time by 75%
b. Allowed model coverage of manually generated tests to be measured
c. Increased model coverage by 9%
5)
Automatic Code Generation on First Model-Based Project
a. Previous projects: Getting software to work with new hardware took
many weeks
b. With Model-Based process using Autocode: The software was running
on the hardware the same day it arrived. One bug was found in the model and
fixed the same day the hardware arrived. Autocode was regenerated and the
hardware was up and running.
6)
Custom Modeling Style Guide
a. Existing modeling style resulted in:
i.
Inefficient ERT code
ii.
ERT code not testable by Reactis
for DO-178B Level A certification
b. Revised modeling style
i.
More efficient ERT code (ROM, RAM,
and CPU throughput)
ii.
ERT code testable by Reactis
iii.
Certification effort reduced
7)
Acceptance Testing of Commercial MATLAB Add-on Tool
a. Created test suite that found a number of bugs in a commercial
add-on tool for MATLAB
b. Tool vendor fixed bugs resulting in more robust tool for the
company to use
8)
Process Improvement
a. Benchmarking and pilot projects allowed a couple of companies to
“leap frog” their competitors for best in class software development processes
(at least in the opinion of Software Beret Inc.)