EE Bookshelf: Test Driven Development for Embedded C

It’s been a while since I mentioned any books on EE Bookshelf, but I’ve picked up quite a few this past year and thought it might be nice to mention some of them.

While my big New Year’s resolution for 2013 is to finally step into the 19th century, following up on my 2012 resolution I’ve been really trying to make an effort to integrate better testing into my code and projects, and part of that is recently playing with Unity, which is a unit testing framework for C that works for embedded projects.

Unit tests and test driven development are familiar terms to most PC developers, but they still haven’t made major inroads into the very traditional embedded space.  James W. Grenning’s book ‘Test Driven Development for Embedded C‘ aims to change that, and make test driven development far more accessible to embedded engineers.

If you’re serious about improving the quality of your code and test procedures grab a copy of the book for a meager $22 (DRM-free e-book) or in print off Amazon, and have a look at why test driven development is at least as relevant to embedded developers as anyone else.  Aside from being a veteran embedded developer, Grenning has been part of the test driven development movement since the very beginning, and he knows what he’s talking about!

Have any experience with Unity or another testing framework, or test driven development in the embedded sphere?  Post about it in the comments below!


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1 Comment

  1. Been using test-driven development with various frameworks over the past 10 years or so. It takes some discipline to apply it at the front-end of a project. But the payoffs keep coming – especially when you need to port a body of code and validate it on some new platform.

    Not so easy to apply to multi-threaded event-driven systems though. The complexity of the test harnesses can rival that of the code under test.

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