Software Engineering, 10th Edition

21.3 Timing analysis

As I discussed in the introduction to this chapter, the correctness of a real-time system depends not just on the correctness of its outputs but also on the time at which these outputs were produced. Therefore, timing analysis is an important activity in the embedded, real-time software development process. In such an analysis, you calculate how often each process in the system must be executed to ensure that all inputs are processed and all system responses are produced in a timely way. The results of the timing analysis are used to decide how frequently each process should execute and how these processes should be scheduled by the real-time operating system.

Timing analysis for real-time systems is particularly difficult ...