Functional Requirements-Based Automated Testing for Avionics
This addresses the labor-intensive and subjective manual testing processes in safety-critical avionics software development, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing Bounded Model Checking techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of reducing testing effort in safety-critical avionics software development by applying Bounded Model Checking to formal low-level requirements to automatically generate tests, demonstrating significant reduction in human effort for software qualification under DO-178 guidance.
We propose and demonstrate a method for the reduction of testing effort in safety-critical software development using DO-178 guidance. We achieve this through the application of Bounded Model Checking (BMC) to formal low-level requirements, in order to generate tests automatically that are good enough to replace existing labor-intensive test writing procedures while maintaining independence from implementation artefacts. Given that existing manual processes are often empirical and subjective, we begin by formally defining a metric, which extends recognized best practice from code coverage analysis strategies to generate tests that adequately cover the requirements. We then formulate the automated test generation procedure and apply its prototype in case studies with industrial partners. In review, the method developed here is demonstrated to significantly reduce the human effort for the qualification of software products under DO-178 guidance.