Enhanced Automotive Real-Time Testing Through Increased Development Process Quality

Abstract: The purpose of this master thesis is to improve the quality of software testing in a large company developing real-time embedded systems. Software testing is a very important part of software development. By performing comprehensive software testing the quality and validity of a software system can be assured. One of the main issues with software testing is to be sure that the tests are correct. Knowing what to test, but also how to perform testing, is of utmost importance. In this thesis, we explore different ways to increase the quality of real-time testing by introducing new techniques in several stages of the software development model. Four complementary methods are suggested. The proposed methods are validated by implementing them in an existing and completed project on a subset of the software development process. The original output from the completed project is compared with the new output. The presented results from the validation are positive in the sense that it is shown that the test stage was more qualitative, mostly due to a higher level of quality on input from earlier stages.