An architecture for deploying model based testing in embedded systems

There have been several model based approaches used in the recent past for alleviating complexity in design, development and test case generation for real-time embedded software systems. However, deploying/executing these test cases in the embedded target without affecting the real-time behavior of the system still remains a challenging and unanswered question. To address this, we propose a novel architecture to perform an integrated model based testing for embedded systems. We introduce a holistic model based design, development and testing approach with the aid of a monitor and target debugger solution for real-time embedded systems. Our proposed approach eliminates the need for dynamic source code instrumentation inserted into the target to execute the software test routines. This will result in preserving the real-time behavior which is a boon especially for real-time critical and code size constrained embedded systems. We illustrate our proposed approach with a prototype and an example.