A Lightweight Framework for Testing Safety-critical Component-based Systems on Embedded Targets

tugraz.at Abstract. Rigorous development and quality assurance are inherent parts in the engineering of safety-critical systems. Many standards that address the development and certification of these systems provide a col-lection of various types of tests that have to be conducted to achieve the desired level of quality. Further, they recommend to perform most of these tests on the target embedded system, rather than on develop-ment hosts for example. For specific architectures, such as those used in component-based systems, this requirement is often difficult to achieve, mostly because of lack of available test frameworks that can support such specific architectures. In this paper, we propose a framework for testing component-based sys-tems on their embedded targets. The test framework allows to deploy software components in their binary form onto such targets. Further, it allows to build compositions out of deployed components so that complete applications can be tested. The compositions are build using the techniques for webservice composition, since interfaces to deployed software components are exposed as webservices. With this lightweight framework, it is possible to conduct some relevant tests required by the safety standards in early development phase, because it only requires software components to be implemented to test complete applications