International Workshop on Embedded Systems (IWES)

BUGSENG is happy to announce its participation in IWES 2025, the International Workshop on Embedded Systems, taking place on September 18-19, in Modena.

IWES is our annual Italian meetup with the embedded systems community, always a pleasure to attend and a unique opportunity to exchange knowledge, experience and perspectives with colleagues and dear friends from both academia and industry.

This year, we will be presenting a talk based on joint work with the University of Parma. This is a project we are particularly passionate about and are proud to have supported continuously over the past years.

Teaching Reliability, Safety & Security as One: an Open-Source, Project-Centric Course Experience

Preparing the next generation of embedded-software engineers requires more than discrete lectures on faults, threats and coding rules: it demands an integrated, hands-on journey that lets students live the full life-cycle of a safety-critical product. For the past three academic years the University of Parma has offered exactly this through the 6-ECTS MSc course “Development of Reliable, Safe and Secure Software”.

Rather than scattering small lab assignments across topics, the course revolves around a single, collaborative capstone: the design and virtual qualification of a neonatal incubator thermostat – an artifact whose dependability stakes are instantly clear to every participant. Working as one development team, students start with stakeholder analysis and STPA-based hazard identification, then follow a condensed but faithful ISO 26262-inspired workflow: requirements elicitation and traceability, architecture definition, unit design, MISRA-guided implementation, MC/DC-oriented verification, continuous integration, system-level simulation and validation. The only steps omitted are hardware manufacture and physical tests, so learners still traverse every software-engineering discipline that feeds a safety case, from risk assessment to coverage closure.

This talk distills three editions of the course into four transferable pedagogical insights:

1. One system, many roles – students rotate between safety, security and quality leads, experiencing the trade-offs first-hand.
2. Traceability as a scaffold – a lightweight requirements management system turns the abstract idea of bidirectional links into a daily habit.
3. Feedback loops over grades – weekly design reviews (with the participation of industry guests) replace traditional mid-term exams, mirroring real assessment gates.
4. Open artifacts, open doors – all templates, checklists, scripts and exemplar work products are released under a permissive license, enabling other universities and companies to adopt or remix the material at zero cost.

Student feedback confirm the approach: across 50+ enrolled students, average project rubric scores is 30/30, while many of them expressed agreement on the fact that the project clarified how safety, security and reliability interlock.

By sharing the lessons learned about orchestration, coaching and tooling, the presentation invites the IWES community to replicate, extend – or even host—the experience. The goal aligns neatly with IWES 2025’s mission to foster academia–industry exchange on embedded-system practice. Attendees will leave with a concrete blueprint for embedding holistic dependability education into their own curricula, plus an open invitation to collaborate on the next iteration.

• When: Friday, September 19, 2025 – 15:25

• Where: University of Modena and Reggio Emilia Via Campi 213/B Modena, Italy

• Session: Safety, Security and Verification

FULL PROGRAM

Want to know more about this project? Meet us in Modena or get in touch, we look forward to catching up with the community, sharing our experience, and discussing how to bring reliability, safety, and security together in embedded-systems education.

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