Real-time System Testing

Many time-dependent and asynchronous real-time systems bring new difficulties to the testing - Time! The Test Case designers not only consider the white box and Black Box testing use case, but also deal with event process (such as interruption process), time series of data and the concurrency of data processing tasks (process). Under many circumstances, the provided test data sometimes makes the real-time system can be operated normally in a state and the same data will lead to mistakes sometimes in different states.

In addition, the close relationship between the software and hardware of real-time system will lead to some testing problems, software testing needs to consider the impact of hardware failures to the software processing, but the real-time simulation of such failures is very difficult. Due to the special nature and complexity of real-time systems, no perfect and integrated design method has been introduced for the test case, but it can be roughly divided into the following four steps:

1. Task testing. The first step to test the real-time system is to test various tasks independently. Design the White Box and Black Box testing for each task, and implement each task in the testing. With the task testing, the logic and functional errors can be found, but not the time and act errors.

2. Behavior Testing. Software model can be created by using CASE tool, which could simulate the real-time system, and check their acts in accordance with the sequence of external events. These activities can be used as the basis to design test case when creating a real-time system.

3. The task time testing. After isolating the errors of internal task and system acts, the time related errors testing should be conducted. Different data rates and load-processing will be used to test the asynchronous tasks communicating with other tasks.

4. System Testing. Software and hardware are integrated to conduct the large-scale system testing and detect the errors on the interface between software and hardware.