Advances on testing safety-critical software: Goal-driven approach, prototype-tool and comparative evaluation
- ISBN: 9728865694
Abstract
The reference company for this paper - a multination organization, Italian branch, that works in the domain of safety-critical systems - evaluated the major tools, which the market provides for testing safety-critical software, as not sufficiently featured for her quality improvement goals. Consequently, in order to investigate the space of possible solutions, if any, the company's Research Lab. started an academic cooperation, which leaded to share knowledge and eventually to establish a common research team. Once we had transformed those goals in detailed technical requirements, and evaluated that it was possible to realize them conveniently in a tool, we passed to analyze, construct, and eventually utilize in field the prototype "Software Test Framework". This tool allows non-intrusive measurements on different hard-soft targets of a distributed system running under one or more Unix standard OS, e.g. LynxOS, AIX, Solaris, and Linux. The tool acquires and graphically displays the real-time flow of data, so enabling users to verify and validate software products, diagnose and resolve emerging performance problems quickly, and enact regression testing. This paper reports on the characteristics of Software Test Framework, its architecture, and results from a case study. Based on comparison of results with previous tools, we can say that Software Test Framework is leading to a new concept of tool for the domain of safety-critical software.
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