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There is no doubt - the amount of software content in electronic systems is increasing dramatically. Experts are estimating that at the end of this development electronic systems will contain 30 percent hardware and 70 percent software to realise its functionality. You can take the mobile phones as an example. These devices started two decades ago as simple telephones and end up to date in the Apple iPhone a multi functional device able to provide all the functionality users are expecting nowadays. The hardware of such devices is more or less standardised - the differentiation is done in software. There are some advantages with this software-centric approach - the most important one is flexibility. You can upgrade the system, add new functionality, and maintain it remotely via internet access.
And youll find a comparable situation in electronic systems for industrial applications. There are PLCs and IPCs with standardized hardware for the dedicated application and - the software makes the difference, too. The more complex an application in the industry is the more complex the software has to be. This means a big effort to develop, verify, and debug the software. Although there are powerful tools commercially available to support the software designer to develop it is nearly impossible to design error-free software. Consequently the verification and debugging of software requires more up to 70 percent of the whole development process. And the situation becomes even worst because the complexity of software will increase dramatically further in future due to the integration of industrial systems into networks which brings security aspect even to embedded software.
If you could reduce the effort of debugging software - which means you have to develop error-free software - you would safe cost. Consequently the quality of software plays an increasingly important role in all segments of the industry. Due to the IDC market survey "Improving Software Quality to Drive Business Agility" spending enterprises up to 14 Million Euros (about $ 22 Million) to debug and correct software errors. The emerging multi-core designs make this situation worse because the complexity and therefore the effort of verification and debugging will remain at very high levels. The problems of poor software quality are caused by various factors like increasing code complexity, distributed software design teams, outsourcing, out-dated code, open-source code, and multi-thread applications. Half of the attendees of the survey admitted that in the first year after a software release up to ten critical errors occurs which requires patches. The expenditure of time to fix the bugs was between on day (16%), two to ten days (66%) and eleven to thirty days (11%). Due to the estimation of the attendees of the survey avoiding the software bugs would result in saving about 32 percent of the entire software development cost.
Due to the fact that globalisation involves fierce competition the success of companies creating industrial electronic systems depends on - beside ongoing innovation - stringent cost control. Software development provides the largest potential for European companies to save costs and remain competitive in the international markets. The software industry realised this and offers tool to improve software quality during the early design stage.
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