Building an interactive test development environment for cyclic executive systems

Modern cars contain millions of lines of code and this number is increasing with each new generation of vehicles. Errors in this software can lead to serious quality and safety concerns. While automating such process completely is often considered as a long term goal, providing interactive tools facilitating test generation is a more realistic and desired step by the automotive industry at this stage. Addressing this need, the goal of this research is to offer an interactive toolset automating generation of tests that reach targets defined by the test engineers as global states of software components of cyclic executive systems. We describe an approach based on symbolic code execution combined with constraint solving and tailored to cyclic executives. A prototype implementing the approach, called SeerC, has been developed and applied to a real-life powertrain software component to assess its usefulness and scalability. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach outperforms the comparable tool CBMC.