CAST: Automating Software Tests for Embedded Systems

Software integration tests for embedded systems must cater for the physical process with which the systems interact and can include user input. This can make testing very time-consuming because test engineers often manually execute test specifications with many thousand lines of instructions. Furthermore, such manual tests are often imprecise because human operators cannot execute interactions at a granularity of a few milliseconds. This article presents the CAST (Computer-Aided Specification and Testing) approach to automating the testing of embedded systems, which consists of three parts: a domain-specific language, which allows test engineers to specify test cases formally with a familiar syntax, an execution engine, which allows them to run tests either automatically or interactively, and an interface, which connects the execution engine to the embedded system. We validate the proposed approach by deploying it to a product testing environment and show that our solution provides several advantages such as significantly reduced testing times and more concise test specifications.