EuroSTAR’96 Systematic Testing of Real-Time Systems

Abstract

The development of embedded systems is an essential industrial activity whose importance is in-creasing. Commonly, embedded software systems have to fulfil real-time requirements. The most important analytical method to assure the quality of real-time systems is dynamic testing. Testing is the only method which examines the actual run-time behaviour of embedded software systems, based on an execution in the real application environment. Dynamic aspects like the duration of computations, the memory actually needed, or the synchronisation of parallel processes are of ma-jor importance for the correct function of real-time systems, and have to be tested. The most important prerequisite for a thorough test is the design of relevant test cases. The classifi-cation-tree method was developed to overcome the shortcomings of current functional testing prac-tice. It turns functional test case design into a process comprising several structured and system-atised parts- making it easy to handle, to understand, and also to document. Nevertheless, the classification-tree method alone is not sufficient for a comprehensive test of em-bedded systems. It is not well-suited for an examination of temporal correctness which is addition-ally essential to real-time systems. Already very small systems show a large variety of different exe