Automatic Testing
Testing is a key activity in the development process of automotive companies. Compliance to CMMI and SPICE standards require that testing is performed at different stages. There are multiple ways you can assure SW quality starting with code reviews, SW static checks and SW verifications, but one method has been proved to be the most rewarding from the point of view of finding defects. And that is SW validation or black box SW testing.
Most automotive companies develop the SW test plan in house and the starting point for this is the SW requirements. This SW test plan is than followed up at each SW release and test cases defined in the plan have to be executed by the test engineer and the results have to be documented. This is the conventional method.
Automatic testing implies that after the test plan is finished and defined, each test case is implemented in a tool which can than execute the test automatically.
Customer benefits
- testing activities can be executed overnight and a full report of the test is available to the development team in the next morning
- Vector tools together with CAPL development offer a very good method to automate 100% of test cases
- Different interfaces can interact with external devices, such as power supplies, oscilloscopes and other measurement equipments
- increased test coverage and better and more complete reports concerning the behavior of the system under test
How automatic testing works
The most common approach for testing is shown in the picture bellow. The System Under Test (SUT) is connected via a bus interface to a PC running CANoe from Vector. Here all test cases are implemented and executed, reports are available in HTML format for the development team and in the same time a full recording of all communication can help establish the root cause of the failed test cases.