An information system for systematic validation of the software used in vehicular microcontrollers

The validation test plans for embedded software need to be very rigorous and thorough. The information technology framework and a vehicle-centered intelligent system presented aims at facilitating this process. This system is designed with the objective of enabling a quantitative determination of the reliability of real-time systems. Software quality metrics are needed in the standardization of software in safety-critical applications, such as those pertaining to the operations of a vehicular microcontroller. A relational DBMS is utilized for a normalized tracking of requirements and the associated tests used in their validation. A granular and non-redundant representation of test-cases enables our system to derive the set of operations that are common to a large number of test-cases. As is demonstrated in this paper these common operations form the basis for test-unification and lead to an automated generation of the singular meta-test cases that are functionally equivalent to two or more lower level test cases.