Open issues for the automotive software testing
Antonio Tierno, Max Mauro Dias Santos, Benedito A. Arruda, Joao N. H. da Rosa · 2016
In recent years, innovations in the automotive industry are based mainly on car electronics and its embedded software, making aspects of the development process of automotive embedded devices a key point. At present, there is a trend in the automotive industry towards employ the methodology of model-based design as in the development process being still possible to be adopted for the software testing. Software components are no longer handwritten in C language or Assembly code in face of the higher level of the functions complexity hosted in cars but they are modelled with specific graphical approach with tools like MATLAB/Simulink/Stateflow, Statemate, or similar tools. Software models facilitate the formulation of algorithms because a specific terminology and a graphical notation provide more clarity than plain-text specifications or program code. Accordingly, also software testing is moving towards that direction: model-based testing is a valid variant of testing that relies on explicit behavior models that encode the intended behavior of a system and possibly the behavior of its environment. A separate discussion is reserved for testing the graphical human machine interface (HMI) of automotive infotainment systems. It has shown to be costly and challenging due to its large function scope, high complexity and multiple variants. There are various model-based testing concepts for graphical HMIs of infotainment systems, but OEMs and Tier 1 companies still perform most of tests manually. In this paper, we describe the classical method still widely used today for software testing of infotainment ECUs, showing its limitations and propose a few advices to improve speed and accuracy of testing activity for HMI systems.