WIRRAL, United Kingdom, 30 Nov. 2008. LDRA integrated its tool suite with Lauterbach's TRACE32 debugger. By providing software testing features such as traceability, verification, and code and quality review, LDRA assists users of the Lauterbach's TRACE32 debugger in fully automating the software testing process with the LDRA tool suite from code coverage to automating unit testing for the target.
LDRA supplies software tools for safety critical applications such as avionics.
To maximize developer flexibility, the LDRA tool suite is compiler agnostic, ensuring that the LDRA-Lauterbach solution can be used with any tool chain whose target silicon is supported by the Lauterbach debugger. Extensions to the LDRA tool suite for the Lauterbach debugger enable download of the code under test to the target and providing the mechanism for result capture back to the host. The interface is automatically managed using Lauterbach's PRACTICE commands created by the LDRA tool suite, easing the learning curve for developers.
"Lauterbach has long been recognized as one of the best tool solutions in the embedded market," says Ian Hennell, LDRA Operations Director. "Previous integrations have typically focused on code-creation tools – the compiler and linker – rather than the execution phase needed for code coverage analysis and unit test."
LDRA has enhanced existing code generation settings with additions to ensure that execution and data capture phase uses the Lauterbach TRACE32 tools. Scripts created using TRACE32's PRACTICE language download code to the target, control the execution of that code, and facilitate the retrieval of unit-test results and code-coverage information. The new scripts can be used together with existing scripts that, for example, initialize the target. The required parameters for the scripts to allow for System Level coverage and both black and white box unit testing are automatically passed by the LDRA tool suite so that there is a high degree of automation requiring little or no engineer involvement during the actual testing, LDRA officials say.
The LDRA tool suite integration with Lauterbach's TRACE32 debugger has been proven with a number of code-generation tools for a number of processors. The solution has been used with the TRACE32 PowerView running on target hardware via BDM or JTAG (TRACE32-ICD), full in circuit emulation (TRACE32-ICE) and with the instruction set simulators (TRACE-SIM). Further updates and developments to the support using Lauterbach TRACE32 are planned in the future.
