Tool suite aids Lauterbach debugger

By providing software testing features such as traceability, verification, and code and quality review, the LDRA tool suite assists users of the Lauterbach Trace32 debugger in fully automating the software testing process from code coverage to automating unit testing for the target.

To maximise developer flexibility, the LDRA tool suite is compiler-agnostic, ensuring that the LDRA-Lauterbach combination 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 allow download of the code under test to the target and provide 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.

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 resulting scripts can be used together with existing scripts that initialise 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.

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 system 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).