Systems Programming

Design and development of real-time computing systems is the most challenging and complex task that can be undertaken by a software engineer. By its very nature, software for real-time systems makes demands on analysis, design and testing techniques that are unknown in other application areas.

Real-time Systems are highly coupled to the external world. That is, real-time software must respond to the problem domain (the real world) in a time frame dictated by the problem domain. Because real-time software must operate under rigorous performance constraints, software design is often driven by hardware as well as software architecture, operating system characteristics as well as application requirements, programming language vagaries as well as design issues.