TESTING EMBEDDED SYSTEM APPLICATIONS

Embedded systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, controlling a wide variety of popular and safety-critical devices. Testing is the most commonly used method for validat-ing software systems, and effective testing techniques could be helpful for improving the dependability of these systems. However, there are challenges involved in developing such techniques. Embedded systems consist of layers of software – application layers utilize services provided by underlying system service and hardware support layers. A typical embedded application consists of multiple user tasks. Interactions between application lay-ers and lower layers, and interactions between the various user tasks that are initiated by the application layer, can be a source of system failures in fielded applications. The “ora-cle problem ” is also a challenging problem in many testing domains, but with embedded systems it can be particularly difficult. Embedded systems employing multiple tasks ca