Study of task profile oriented embedded software test aiming to improve reliability

Software test has become a very effective way to find software defects and improve software quality especially reliability. Study of the embedded software test has been receiving more consideration from researchers and engineers for its special characteristics. In this paper software task profile is proposed to give the accurate and complete description of the complicated interactions and time sequences within embedded software. It also ensures test cases generated based on it can be running in actual embedded software systems and related information such as task characteristics and task state can be collected. Strategies based on the state coverage are presented to implement the software test process and accelerate the process by dividing the whole process into stabilizing and controlling ones, at the same time task reliability based on an engineering algorithm can be quantitatively calculated not by software failure data which are used in conventional reliability test but by the statistics of the contribution of task attributes.