Software and hardware quality assurance: towards a common platform for high reliability

The authors point out the conceptual similarity between two quality assurance technologies emerging independently in the worlds of software and hardware. They outline the advantages of these technologies over competing ones and then argue how, by exploiting this similarity and the emerging parallel processing technology, a common platform of integratable tools can be built to perform cost-effective hardware and software testing for complex products of the future. Both techniques use fault modeling for showing the presence of faults in the objects of interest, namely, the program and the circuit. However, the test generation method used in mutation-based testing appears more general than the one used for hardware testing when their functional details are examined. As most useful hardware consists of sequential circuits with memory, the test data generation method used in software testing seems worthy of examination for hardware test vector generation also