Requirements-based Automated Test Generation for Safety Critical Software

Abstract

With the growing size and complexity of safety critical software in industrial domains such as aviation, automotive and medical devices, developing tests for such software to achieve corresponding standards such as DO-178C and ISO-26262 has become a challenge. Existing test generation tools are either not generating a complete set of tests to satisfy the standards or requires considerable human interventions. General Electric developed a toolchain called ASSERT™ (Analysis of Semantic Specifications and Efficient generation of Requirements based Tests) to address the challenges and limitations of existing tools by formally capturing requirements and automatically generating a complete set of requirements-based tests to satisfy certain industry standards. This paper describes our approach to automatically generate test objectives, test cases, and test procedures from requirements to satisfy DO-178C. We demonstrate ASSERT™'s requirements-based automated test generation (ATG) tool on an avionics system.