Embedded software testing in research environment. A practical guide for non-experts

Testing is nowadays one of the most important part of product development lifecycle. The goal of this publication is to provide brief description of embedded software testing in research environment. It is divided into several parts and addresses the problem of testing embedded devices not only from the source code perspective, but it also takes into consideration testing the complete system behavior. The first part of the article focuses on comparison between automatic and manual tests, trying to decide when automated tests are useful and when useless or at least not cost effective. The paper describes mainly testing industrial automation devices and some methodologies dedicated for testing this type of devices. A significant part of the paper is related to unit testing and certification tests of device's safety critical functions. Applicability of Test Driven Development is considered. In succeeding parts, functional tests, testing support tools and test documentation are described. An important step is automatic test report generation including coverage estimation methods. The last part is related to integration tests which often require building large testing infrastructure that consist of certified equipment and dedicated testing environment.