What we know about testing embedded software

To cost-effectively test embedded software, practitioners and researchers have proposed many test techniques, approaches, tools, and frameworks. However, obtaining an overview of the state of the art and state of the practice in this area is challenging for practitioners or new researchers. In addition, owing to an inadequate overview of what already exists in this area, some companies often reinvent the wheel by designing a test approach that’s new to them but already exists. To address these problems, the authors conducted a systematic literature review of this area that covered the testing topics, testing activities, test artifacts, and industries on which the studies focused. The results can benefit both practitioners and researchers by serving as an index to the vast body of knowledge in this important, fast-growing area

Model-based passive testing of safety-critical components

Passive testing is a complementary technique to active testing. For some types of systems, for example dynamic or adaptive distributed systems which are able to re-configure themselves at runtime in response to changes in their environments, exhaustive active testing before deployment is either theoretically impossible or practically not feasible. For such types of systems the additional application of the technique of passive testing is recommendable. However, a comprehensive theory and taxonomy of methods and techniques for model-based passive testing does –as far as we know– not yet exist and is from today’s perspective still very much a topic for future research in this domain. For this reason the presentation of the topic in this chapter is very much example-based such as to provide the reader with some first intuitions about what model-based passive testing is, what kinds of techniques could be used to implement it, and what could be some typical application scenarios for model-based passive testing in the domains of software systems, hardware systems, as well as embedded software+hardware systems.Note: Section 5 of our chapter, as well as several Figures and a number of Acknowledgments, which will appear in the above-mentioned book, are OMITTED in this pre-print version.http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/978143981845

Agent Based Test and Repair of Distributed Systems

This article demonstrates how to use intelligent agents for testing and repairing a distributed system, whose elements may or may not have embedded BIST (Built-In Self-Test) and BISR (Built-In Self-Repair) facilities. Agents are software modules that perform monitoring, diagnosis and repair of the faults. They form together a society whose members communicate, set goals and solve tasks. An experimental solution is presented, and future developments of the proposed approach are explore

Initial thoughts on rapid prototyping techniques

This paper sets some context, raises issues, and provides our initial thinking on the characteristics of effective rapid prototyping techniques.After discussing the role rapid prototyping techniques can play in the software lifecycle, the paper looks at possible technical approaches including: heavily parameterized models, reusable software, rapid prototyping languages, prefabrication techniques for system generation, and reconfigurable test harnesses.The paper concludes that a multi-faceted approach to rapid prototyping techniques is needed if we are to address a broad range of applications successfully -- no single technical approach suffices for all potentially desirable applications

SmartUnit: Empirical Evaluations for Automated Unit Testing of Embedded Software in Industry

In this paper, we aim at the automated unit coverage-based testing for embedded software. To achieve the goal, by analyzing the industrial requirements and our previous work on automated unit testing tool CAUT, we rebuild a new tool, SmartUnit, to solve the engineering requirements that take place in our partner companies. SmartUnit is a dynamic symbolic execution implementation, which supports statement, branch, boundary value and MC/DC coverage. SmartUnit has been used to test more than one million lines of code in real projects. For confidentiality motives, we select three in-house real projects for the empirical evaluations. We also carry out our evaluations on two open source database projects, SQLite and PostgreSQL, to test the scalability of our tool since the scale of the embedded software project is mostly not large, 5K-50K lines of code on average. From our experimental results, in general, more than 90% of functions in commercial embedded software achieve 100% statement, branch, MC/DC coverage, more than 80% of functions in SQLite achieve 100% MC/DC coverage, and more than 60% of functions in PostgreSQL achieve 100% MC/DC coverage. Moreover, SmartUnit is able to find the runtime exceptions at the unit testing level. We also have reported exceptions like array index out of bounds and divided-by-zero in SQLite. Furthermore, we analyze the reasons of low coverage in automated unit testing in our setting and give a survey on the situation of manual unit testing with respect to automated unit testing in industry.Comment: In Proceedings of 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice Track, Gothenburg, Sweden, May 27-June 3, 2018 (ICSE-SEIP '18), 10 page

BlogForever D5.2: Implementation of Case Studies

This document presents the internal and external testing results for the BlogForever case studies. The evaluation of the BlogForever implementation process is tabulated under the most relevant themes and aspects obtained within the testing processes. The case studies provide relevant feedback for the sustainability of the platform in terms of potential users’ needs and relevant information on the possible long term impact

The use of ICT and e-learning by work-based learning providers 2006: survey, waves 1 and 2

The report presents the findings of the 2005-06 survey of technology use and implementation by work-based learning providers in England

Improving Screencast Accessibility for People with Disabilities: Guidelines and Techniques

Screencast video tutorials are increasingly popular in libraries, but may present access problems for people with disabilities unless specific accessibility features are added during screencast creation. This article reviews existing standards for accessible web-based multimedia and gives guidelines on how to create accessible screencasts based on these standards