Automated requirements-driven testing of embedded systems based on use case specifications and timed automata

The complexity of embedded software in safety-critical domains, such as automotive and
avionics, has significantly increased over the years. For most embedded systems, standards require
system testing to explicitly demonstrate that the software meets its functional and safety
requirements. In these domains, system test cases are often manually derived from functional requirements
in natural language plus other design artefacts, like UML statecharts. The definition of
system test cases is therefore time-consuming and error-prone, especially given the quickly rising
complexity of embedded systems.
The benefits of automatic test generation are widely acknowledged today but existing approaches
often require behavioural models that tend to be complex and expensive to produce, and
are thus often not part of development practice.
The work proposed in this dissertation focusses on the automated generation of test cases for
testing the compliance between software and its functional and timing requirements. This dissertation
is inspired by contexts where functional and timing requirements are expressed by means of
use case specifications and timing automata, respectively. This is the development context of our
industrial partner, IEE, an automotive company located in Luxembourg, who provided the case
study used to validate the approach and tool described in this dissertation.
This dissertation presents five main contributions: (1) A set of guidelines for the definition of
functional and timing requirements to enable the automated generation of system test cases. (2) A
technique for the automated generation of functional test cases from requirements elicited in the
form of use case specifications following a prescribed template and natural-language restrictions.
(3) A technique that reuses the automatically generated functional test cases to generate timeliness
test cases from minimal models of the timing requirements of the system. (4) A technique
for the automated generation of oracles for non-deterministic systems whose specifications are
expressed by means of timed automata. In the context of this dissertation, automated oracles for
non-deterministic systems are necessary to evaluate the results of the generated timeliness test
cases. (5) The evaluation of the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed guidelines and
techniques on an industrial case study, a representative automotive embedded system developed
by IEE.