Model-driven platform-specific testing through configurable simulations

Abstract

The increasing size and complexity of software systems requires sophisticated testing methodologies. Since platform limitations could void the results of test suites, especially the embedded systems domain requires testing methodologies that also consider hardware resources. Current approaches for specifying and executing test cases, e.g. approaches based on the UML testing model, do not support the concept of platform testing very well. Deployment descriptions are only used for documentation. In this work, we address this problem by providing an extension to the UML testing profile that covers the modeling of platform testing models, which include realistic deployments, and by C-PartsSim, our simulation tool that is capable of executing these platform testing models. With C-PartsSim, it is possible to connect specialized simulators at runtime, thereby providing a configurable, platform-specific system simulation for testing. We describe the automatic transformation from scenario models to a tailored simulator instance for a concrete testing scenario and present case studies to demonstrate the flexibility and accuracy of our approach. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.