Arttest – a New Test Environment for Model-Based Software Development

Modern vehicles become increasingly software intensive. Software development therefore is critical to the success of the manufacturer to develop state of the art technology. Standards like ISO 26262 recommend requirement-based verification and test cases that are derived from requirements analysis. Agile development uses continuous integration tests which rely on test automation and evaluation. All these drove the development of a new model-based software verification environment. Various aspects had to be taken into account: the test case specification needs to be easily comprehensible and flexible in order to allow testing of different functional variants. The test environment should support different use cases like open-loop or closed-loop testing and has to provide corresponding evaluation methods for continuously changing as well as for discrete signals. In a joint project of RWTH Aachen University and Ford, a new tool, Arttest, has been developed for testing model-based software. The tool uses a domain specific language to specify the tests. It offers different test evaluation methods for automated open- and closed-loop testing and reactive testing. It automatically executes the tests, evaluates the outputs and generates summary reports indicating passed tests and errors found. The paper presents the tool and its various unique propositions such as domain specific test language, the evaluation properties and other features like open-loop and closed-loop capabilities.