Melhorando a qualidade de código para soluções em sistemas embarcados com o Zeta Middleware

Abstract

Context: Embedded Systems (ES) are computational systems designed for specific problems using devices with memory and processing limitations. The Internet of Things (IoT) is helping to spread massively the number of devices around the world. So that, ES firmware is growing in complexity and size as demand increases. Due to the increase in complexity, reduction of time-to-market, and problems related to the application of software engineer concepts, a large number of devices in the market have a high maintenance cost throughout their life cycle. Objective: From state-of-art research, we observed that ES projects with different maturity levels present technical debt related to architecture, code, and tests. Thus, the objective of this work is to design a tool to assist new ES projects in order to facilitate the firmware implementation and maintenance, providing an architecture that reduces the code complexity and more suitable for tests. Method: This work presents a middleware named Zeta that provides a software architecture for ES in order to provide time-decoupling, space-decoupling, and synchronizationdecoupling. The Zeta has a Command Line Interface responsible to generate the base code using the Template-Based Code Generation technique and assists the user in customizations for your application. Results: The results suggest that Zeta has a positive impact on the development because, in a comparison between traditional implementations used in the market, the solution developed with Zeta had a performance better or equal in all of the code quality metrics used. Conclusion: In face of the work developed and their results, we believe that the Zeta Middleware is capable to be used in order to provide a code development with a better software quality, which implies in the speed of development and in a lower maintenance cost.