Connectivity Testing

This paper presents a new approach, connectivity testing, for testing embedded systems. Instead of testing the conformance of a system against its specification, which often turns out to be infeasible, we suggest to test only the composition of the software and the hardware. We assume the software to be correct so only the hardware component may be erroneous. Our framework is based on the notion of a (single fault) fault model, that is a model which formally captures errors in the interface between the hardware and the software. Output and input fault models are considered. An exhaustive test suite for a fault model is a test suite that detects the faults of the model with 100% coverage. We prove the problem of computing a smallest exhaustive test suite to be NP-hard and devise heuristic polynomial time algorithms computing minimal exhaustive test suites. We have carried out experiments with the algorithms implemented using Binary Decision Diagrams. Test generation from specifications containing more than 4.98 × 10¹⁰ states have been carried out.