Aspect Oriented Testing Frameworks for Embedded Software

Summary

Due to the complexity and size of embedded software together with strong demands on time-to-market and quality, testing is a crucial point that should be addressed during software development. Traditionally, testing is carried out during the last phases of the software development life cycle. As a consequence, testing activities are often subject to high time pressure, which either results in delayed market introduction or low product quality. The validation of functional and real-time requirements of embedded systems is a difficult task. It usually needs the electronic control unit and the controlled hardware components. But very often the hardware components are not available for testing the control software at the beginning of the development.

In this paper, we paper presents how test cases can be designed from use cases and how embedded control software can be validated without hardware components by simulating the test cases in early development phases using the AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming). For achieving an aspect oriented testable format, extended UML sequence diagrams are applied to formalize sequences of events, which have been specified in the use case scenarios. Provided that black box aspect oriented is used for developing embedded component applications, the monitoring of the dynamic behavior inside the components is not possible during simulation. But the simulated dynamic behavior is observable on the connections between the software components. In such a way monitored and recorded time stamp events are finally compared offline against the expected sequences of events specified in the test cases. The offline comparison validates the simulated behavior by demonstrating the fulfillment of user requirements and by detecting errors in case of contradictions during modeling.