ADVANCES ON TESTING SAFETY-CRITICAL SOFTWARE - Goal-driven Approach, Prototype-tool and Comparative Evaluation

Guido Pennella, Christian Di Biagio, Gianfranco Pesce, Giovanni Cantone

2006

Abstract

The reference company for this paper – a multination organization, Italian branch, that works in the domain of safety-critical systems – evaluated the major tools, which the market provides for testing safety-critical software, as not sufficiently featured for her quality improvement goals. Consequently, in order to investigate the space of possible solutions, if any, the company’s Research Lab. started an academic cooperation, which leaded to share knowledge and eventually to establish a common research team. Once we had transformed those goals in detailed technical requirements, and evaluated that it was possible to realize them conveniently in a tool, we passed to analyze, construct, and eventually utilize in field the prototype “Software Test Framework”. This tool allows non-intrusive measurements on different hard-soft targets of a distributed system running under one or more Unix standard OS, e.g. LynxOS, AIX, Solaris, and Linux. The tool acquires and graphically displays the real-time flow of data, so enabling users to verify and validate software products, diagnose and resolve emerging performance problems quickly, and enact regression testing. This paper reports on the characteristics of Software Test Framework, its architecture, and results from a case study. Based on comparison of results with previous tools, we can say that Software Test Framework is leading to a new concept of tool for the domain of safety-critical software.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Pennella G., Di Biagio C., Pesce G. and Cantone G. (2006). ADVANCES ON TESTING SAFETY-CRITICAL SOFTWARE - Goal-driven Approach, Prototype-tool and Comparative Evaluation . In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Software and Data Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT, ISBN 978-972-8865-69-6, pages 218-223. DOI: 10.5220/0001311002180223

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icsoft06,
author={Guido Pennella and Christian Di Biagio and Gianfranco Pesce and Giovanni Cantone},
title={ADVANCES ON TESTING SAFETY-CRITICAL SOFTWARE - Goal-driven Approach, Prototype-tool and Comparative Evaluation},
booktitle={Proceedings of the First International Conference on Software and Data Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT,},
year={2006},
pages={218-223},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0001311002180223},
isbn={978-972-8865-69-6},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the First International Conference on Software and Data Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT,
TI - ADVANCES ON TESTING SAFETY-CRITICAL SOFTWARE - Goal-driven Approach, Prototype-tool and Comparative Evaluation
SN - 978-972-8865-69-6
AU - Pennella G.
AU - Di Biagio C.
AU - Pesce G.
AU - Cantone G.
PY - 2006
SP - 218
EP - 223
DO - 10.5220/0001311002180223