Completeness-driven development

Abstract

Due to the steadily increasing complexity, the design of embedded systems faces serious challenges. To meet these challenges additional abstraction levels have been added to the conventional design flow resulting in Electronic System Level (ESL) design. Besides abstraction, the focus in ESL during the development of a system moves from design to verification, i.e. checking whether or not the system works as intended becomes more and more important. However, at each abstraction level only the validity of certain properties is checked. Completeness, i.e. checking whether or not the entire behavior of the design has been verified, is usually not continuously checked. As a result, bugs may be found very late causing expensive iterations across several abstraction levels. This delays the finalization of the embedded system significantly. In this work, we present the concept of Completeness-Driven Development (CDD). Based on suitable completeness measures, CDD ensures that the next step in the design process can only be entered if completeness at the current abstraction level has been achieved. This leads to an early detection of bugs and accelerates the whole design process. The application of CDD is illustrated by means of an example. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.