Property-based testing for LG home appliances using accelerated software-in-the-loop simulation

Abstract

As LG home appliances promise more convenience features to endusers, the complexity of their control software is also increasing, creating a higher pressure for software verification. However, since the embedded software is tightly coupled with its hardware counterpart, the development and verification schedules are dependent upon hardware development and this hinders integration testing to be performed as thoroughly as it deserves. Furthermore, the manually-crafted test cases have had limitations, both in terms of the thoroughness of state-space exploration and the power of test oracles. To overcome these problems and facilitate a more efficient software verification, we introduce a property-based testing framework using software-in-the-loop simulation (SILS). SILS allows the software to be integrated virtually and tested before the hardware is fully developed, and, further, it enables an acceleration in test executions of up to a few tens of thousand times. Property-based testing is achieved by translating the formalized properties to synchronous observers which can concurrently check the violation of the verification property during test executions. In the field application, we discovered two fault cases in real products under development using our framework. According to our analysis, these cases could not have been found using manual testing, but made possible by our testing framework. These cases could have cost the company tens of million dollars each, if they were not discovered until after sale.