StateWORKS Newsletter 5/04
Topics:
1. Welcome
Today, I would like to present you a technical note which describes the debugging facilities used in StateWORKS. This topic might seem to be more appropriate to a user's manual. I have prepared a note on this topic as the StateWORKS facilities seem so unusual in comparison with a programmer's typical experience; especially for a programmer who has to use a code debugger or still include printf statement in the code (in some software development environments the clocks stopped 20 years ago).
StateWORKS Studio LE on our web site has been updated and contains all facilities described in the technical note.
Regards
F. Wagner
2. Technical note: Debugging State Machines
Using the StateWORKS development environment we need not worry about code errors but we still may make logical errors in our application. This application is in StateWORKS defined by a system of state machines. We may introduce errors while specifying state machines and RTDB object properties. The errors manifest themselves by erroneous behavior of the state machines. Thus, the major remaining problem in applying StateWORKS is the debugging of state machines.
StateWORKS Studio offers for this purpose a range of facilities, including: log and trace files, step mode for state machines, command files for test repetition, service (forced state) mode for objects. All this is completed by automatically generated and therefore always up-to-date documentation.
The StateWORKS debugging facilities are described in details in the technical note on our web site.
3. Extension to the VFSM executor step mode
The step mode for state machines is the most powerful weapon against tricky behavioral problems. Up to now we have defined the step mode for a state machine as one state transition. Input actions which often accompany the transition were not "seen"; they were hidden. Recently, we have improved the step mode extending the definition:
A step mode authorizes one transition or the input action(s) or in some cases both: input actions(s) and a transition, if these are triggered by essentially the same input event.
Monitors display the information about the intended next state and input actions, at the point where these will occur on the next step. So SWMon offers very powerful display and control of the step mode.
To try out the powerful step mode facilities you will need to download the latest version of StateWORKS Studio which contains the updated SWLab and Monitors: SWMon, SWTerm and SWQuick, with their documentation. There is no need to obtain a new license file.