Testing Legacy Embedded Code: Landing on a Software Engineering Desert Island

Research on software engineering typically focuses on mainstream languages such as Java, .NET, and C. It is validated using projects easily executable and deployable on a desktop machine. Real, embedded, legacy code is however seldom made of such clean code. This article presents such a case. We performed the analysis and testing of legacy code, which is mix of C and DSP assembly. Such combinations of technologies cannot be analyzed by regular software engineering tools, creating a de facto software engineering desert island. Our solution relies on writing a parser for the DSP code, static analyzers, and using integration test cases. To run the tests, we also automate deployment on the target hardware and run the tests from an integration server.