Industrial System Level Test Automation

Abstract: Vehicular software systems control and monitor many safety-critical functions, such as automated emergency brakes and anti-spin. These functions are integrated and tested at system level to ensure that the entire system works as intended.Traditionally, these functions or selected combinations of functions are tested in isolation. Although desired, rigorous testing of combinations of functions prior to deployment is seldom possible. One reason is the overwhelming work required to write new test cases for the nearly infinite combinations of functions and driving scenarios. Since software testing already accounts for up to 60% of the software development cost and the execution time in test rigs is expensive, further testing must be achieved by running test cases more in parallel. Moreover, new test cases must be reusable in different driving scenarios to cover more combinations of functions.  One solution is to express the test logic in a new way so that it can be executed in parallel, independently of other tests and independent of the input stimuli. This would allow reusing the test logic for different sequences or drive scenarios. Passive testing is one such approach that has not yet been used much for vehicular software due to perceived difficulties, although it is well-established in other domains. One particular problem is how to specify and execute passive test cases for vehicular systems in an, for the test engineer, intuitive and straightforward manner. Further, there is a lack of tool support and knowledge on efficiently applying passive testing in an industrial context.  Thus, the overall research goal of this thesis is to propose and evaluate industrially applicable methods and tools for passive testing at the system level of vehicular software systems. The research is based on a series of papers and case studies within the vehicular industry. In contrast to existing specification languages based on formal mathematical expressions, considerable effort was spent creating an intuitive language and an interactive tool, simple but powerful enough, to encourage the industrial application of passive testing. The main contributions include an easy-to-write and easy-to-read description language for passive test cases, an interactive development environment, and knowledge on how to succeed in passive testing in an industrial software development process. The findings of this thesis contribute to making passive testing a viable method for system-level testing and a way of reusing test logic. In the case of a studied train control management system, using passive testing may reuse up to 50% of the test logic for the safety-related requirements and 10% of the non-safety-related requirements.