Low and non-intrusive software instrumentation: a survey of requirements and methods

The Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) initiatives reduce access to some of the traditional methods of customizing systems for better testing. Testing of embedded systems has often been aided by providing special access to test data. In mission critical and high value real time embedded systems (DOD, nuclear, telephony, transportation, etc.) special "hooks" have been provided to assist software and system testing. A broad set of requirements with emphasis on real time embedded systems is provided, followed by some of the past and current methods of meeting these requirements. Some emphasis is placed on the payoff for instrumenting embedded systems and some possible ways to move forward given the limitations of present COTS processors.