Experience Report: Model-Based Test Automation of a Concurrent Flight Software Bus
Dharmalingam Ganesan, Mikael Lindvall, Stefan Hafsteinsson, Rance Cleaveland, Susanne L. Strege, Walter Moleski · 2016
Many systems make use of concurrent tasks, however it is often difficult to test concurrent design. Therefore, many test cases are simplified and do not fully test all concurrency aspects of the system. We encountered this problem when analyzing test cases for concurrent flight software at NASA. To address this problem, we developed and evaluated a model based testing (MBT) technique for testing of concurrent systems. Using MBT, the tester creates a model, which is based on the requirements of the system under test (SUT), and lets the computer generate innumerable test cases automatically from the model. We evaluate the effectiveness of the technique using Microsoft's Spec Explorer MBT tool. We apply the technique on NASA's Core Flight Software (cFS) software bus module API, which is based on a concurrent publisher-subscriber architecture style and is a safety-critical system. We describe how we created a test automation architecture for testing concurrent inter-task communication as carried out by the software bus. We also investigate the type of issues the technique for testing of concurrent systems can find as well as what degree of code coverage it can achieve.