RUI: Testing Embedded Systems

当前可用的测试方法没有在工业中得到广泛或有效的利用，这有几个原因，包括诸如截止日期压力、在软件和硬件上进行大量初始投资的必要性、方法的不实用性，或者无法与嵌入式系统一起工作等因素。这个项目解决了一个一直困扰工业界的测试问题：嵌入式系统。嵌入式系统固有的多处理特性使得它们特别难以测试。例如，每个仪表的控制和显示可以作为自己的执行线程来实现。快速测试所有可能的交错会导致组合爆炸。代码复杂性直接导致了这些组合。处理复杂性的一种方法是通过抽象。本研究旨在开发一种基于状态池和约束的测试策略。约束表示对象之间必须维护的关系。通过将这些关系视为原子单元，可以增加执行粒度，减少交错执行路径的数量。在一个工业伙伴的合作下，正在探索将其应用于生产系统。

Current available testing methodologies have not been widely or productively utilized in industry for several reasons, including such factors as deadline pressures, necessity of a large initial investment in software and hardware, impracticality of methodologies, or inability to work with embedded systems. This project addresses one testing issue which has been problematic for industry: embedded systems. The inherent multiprocessing in embedded systems makes them particularly difficult to test. For example, each instrument control and display may be implemented as its own thread of execution. Testing all possible interleavings quickly results in a combinatorial explosion. Code complexity directly contributes to these combinatorics. One approach for handling complexity is through abstraction. This research seeks to develop a testing strategy based on state pools and constraints. Contraints represent relationships that must be maintained between objects. By treating these relationships as atomic units, execution granularity can be increased, reducing the number of interleaved execution paths. With the cooperation of an industry partner, application to production systems is being explored.