Testing High-Reliability Software for Continuous Casting Steel Plants - Experiences and Lessons Learned from Siemens VAI

As the world's leading supplier of metallurgical plants, Siemens VAI provides integrated and universally applicable continuous casting systems for the steel industry. The complexity of the process of casting liquid steel is supported by software products that enable high-quality steel casts and efficient plant performance. Over the last recent years Siemens VAI developed a flexible software product line. The system has been classified as highly reliable, which implies rigorous and systematic testing throughout all phases of the development lifecycle. In this paper we investigate how testing is embedded in the development life- cycle and how various testing methods are applied to ensure high software reliability. The lessons learned distilled from over five years of project experience discuss practices that contributed to the current testing approach.