An automatic approach to integration testing for critical automotive software

Abstract

Software is today dominating the development of novel automotive applications, and it is more and more responsible for critical functionalities, from battery management in hybrid vehicles to active safety, to autonomous driving. To guarantee the proper level of quality a strict development process such as that described in the ISO26262 shall be adopted, which requires intensive test activities, being integration test one of them. To successfully reach the goals of integration test, testers shall excite the software running on the target hardware with stimuli representative of those produced once the design under test (DUT) is integrated in the vehicle, and observe the produced response looking for deviations with respect to the expected outputs. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach to automate the test stimuli generation, application, and output response evaluation, making possible developing higher quality test with respect to a relevant industrial use case.