Episode 73: Real Time Systems with Bruce Powel Douglass

This episode is a conversation with Bruce Powel Douglass on real
time systems. We started by discussing what real time software is,
and explored the difference between hard and soft real time. We
then looked at different scheduling strategies, and the meaning of
terms like urgency and importance in the context of scheduling.
Next was a discussion of typical architectural styles for real time
systems and how architectures are described in this context. This
led us to a discussion about the importance of modeling, formalisms
and languages as well as the role of automatic code generation from
those models. We then looked at how to model QoS aspects and the
role of SysML for modeling real time systems. We then had a brief
look at which programming languages are used these days for real
time systems and the role of static analysis to determine various
properties of those programs in advance. The last part of the
discussion focused on some best practices for building real time
systems, the challenges in distributed real time systems and how
real time systems can be tested effectively.