Test Driven Development for Embedded C

Preface

I was first exposed to Test-Driven Development at the first Extreme Programming Immersion^[1] in 1999. At the time, I was working on a team creating an embedded communications system. We had just begun extracting use cases from the project’s requirements document when I took a week away from the client to attend Immersion. It changed my professional life. I had discovered Test-Driven Development (among other things).

As with many embedded development efforts, having a product release held up by software development was not new. But we couldn’t start, because the hardware and OS were not decided on or ready. Each day added to the overall schedule. We were set up, again, because the target hardware bottleneck choked progress to a slow ...