Nowadays, vehicle integrators (OEMs) put over fifty different control units (ECUs) in a vehicle. The AUTOSAR standard for Basic Software (BSW) describes in detail how the communication software components should be implemented in order to enable these ECUs to seamless work together. When integrating ECUs with BSW from different vendors, one needs to ensure that the standard is interpreted in the same way. This requires testing, but the traditional testing approach of manually crafted tests has failed due to the enormous configurability of the software. By using a novel approach based on automatically generated test cases from models and configurations, we solve this testing problem.
In addition to the obvious requirement that an acceptance test strategy must have high coverage with respect to specification requirements, it is also very important that the tests have a low life cycle cost (LCC). A low LCC implies as well low cost for developing the test as a high maintainability. Our solution does turn out to be more effective, but also more efficient than manually written test cases. This enables OEMs to allow software from different vendors in their ECUs, therewith reducing cost related to enforcing ECU vendors to buy from one specific software vendor.
