Context Software testability is the degree to which a software system or a unit under test supports its own testing. To predict and improve software testability, a large number of techniques and metrics have been proposed by both practitioners and researchers in the last several decades. Reviewing and getting an overview of the entire state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice in this area is often challenging for a practitioner or a new researcher. Objective Our objective is to summarize the body of knowledge in this area and to benefit the readers (both practitioners and researchers) in preparing, measuring and improving software testability. Method To address the above need, the authors conducted a survey in the form of a systematic literature mapping (classification) to find out what we as a community know about this topic. After compiling an initial pool of 303 papers, and applying a set of inclusion/exclusion criteria, our final pool included 208 papers (published between 1982 and 2017). Results The area of software testability has been comprehensively studied by researchers and practitioners. Approaches for measurement of testability and improvement of testability are the most-frequently addressed in the papers. The two most often mentioned factors affecting testability are observability and controllability. Common ways to improve testability are testability transformation, improving observability, adding assertions, and improving controllability. Conclusion This paper serves for both researchers and practitioners as an “index” to the vast body of knowledge in the area of testability. The results could help practitioners measure and improve software testability in their projects. To assess potential benefits of this review paper, we shared its draft version with two of our industrial collaborators. They stated that they found the review useful and beneficial in their testing activities. Our results can also benefit researchers in observing the trends in this area and identify the topics that require further investigation.

A survey on software testability

We present a method for systematic consideration of security attributes in development of cyber-physical systems. We evaluate our method in development of commercial vehicles that were so far unreasonably excluded from automotive security studies (despite the great importance of commercial vehicles for the society). We have conducted analysis of a known zero-cost non-physical attack, fine-tuned to our commercial vehicle (a truck), and considered countermeasures within the development flow.

Security-aware development of cyber-physical systems illustrated with automotive case study

A general, compositional, and component-based contract theory is proposed for modeling and specifying heterogeneous systems, characterized by consisting of parts from different domains, e.g. software, electrical and mechanical. Given a contract consisting of assumptions and a guarantee, clearly separated conditions on a component and its environment are presented where the conditions ensure that the guarantee is fulfilled—a responsibility assigned to the component, given that the environment fulfills the assumptions. The conditions are applicable whenever it cannot be ensured that the sets of ports of components are partitioned into inputs and outputs, and hence fully support scenarios where components, characterized by both causal and acausal models, are to be integrated by solely relying on the information of a contract. An example of such a scenario of industrial relevance is explicitly considered, namely a scenario in a supply chain where the development of a component is outsourced. To facilitate the application of the theory in practice, necessary properties of contracts are also derived to serve as sanity checks of the conditions. Furthermore, based on a graph that represents a structuring of a hierarchy of contracts, sufficient conditions to achieve compositionality are presented.

/pdf/conditions-of-contracts-for-separating-responsibilities-in-3sd32bf87t.pdf

Conditions of contracts for separating responsibilities in heterogeneous systems

Software testability is the degree to which a software system or a unit under test supports its own testing. To predict and improve software testability, a large number of techniques and metrics have been proposed by both practitioners and researchers in the last several decades. Reviewing and getting an overview of the entire state-of-the-art and -practice in this area is often challenging for a practitioner or a new researcher. Our objective is to summarize the state-of-the-art and -practice in this area and to benefit the readers (both practitioners and researchers) in preparing, measuring and improving software testability. To address the above need, we conducted a survey in the form of a systematic literature mapping (classification) in this area. After compiling an initial pool of 303 papers, a systematic voting was conducted among the authors, and our final pool included 208 papers. The area of software testability has been comprehensively studied by researchers and practitioners. Approaches for measurement of testability and improvement of testability are the most-frequently addressed in the papers. The two most often mentioned factors affecting testability are observability and controllability. Common ways to improve testability are testability transformation, improving observability, adding assertions, and improving controllability. The results could help practitioners measure and improve software testability in their projects. To assess potential benefits of this review paper, we shared its draft version with two of our industrial collaborators. They mentioned that they found the review useful and beneficial in their testing activities. Our results can also benefit researchers in observing the trends in this area and identify the topics which need further investigations.

What we know about software testability: a survey.

Safety analysis is becoming more and more important in a wide class of systems. In the automotive field, the recent ISO26262 foresees safety analysis to be performed at different levels: system, software and hardware. The assessment of architecture with respect to safety is typically better understood at system and HW levels, while an equivalent analysis at SW level has not such an established background. In literature, approaches exist to handle specific activities related to the safety assessment of software, but they are typically not so well integrated within a more general assessment and certification process. Recent safety standards put more and more emphasis on software-level safety analysis, therefore calling for a precise methodology for the assessment of software architectures. While ISO26262 requirements prescribe safety analysis of the software architecture, clear guidelines on how it should be performed are not provided, thus leaving an important gap for its industrial adoption. In this paper we provide our view on how such analysis should be performed, through the identification of well defined and repeatable activities, thus providing our contribution to a timely problem of great relevance in the automotive domain.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00848469/document

On the Need of a Methodological Approach for the Assessment of Software Architectures within ISO26262

12ISO26262 is a recently approved standard for functional safety in road vehicles. It provides guidelines on minimization of unreasonable safety risks during development of embedded systems in road vehicles. However, the development process specified in ISO26262 involves a number of steps that will require changing traditional and well established development processes. In a transition phase, however, due to lack of tool support, the steps may be performed manually, increasing the risk for delays and increased cost. This paper describes a case study in which we have successfully worked with traceability and testability of functional safety requirements, as well as safety requirements assigned to a testing tool that automates integration and verification steps, leading to standard-compliant tool qualification. Our tool qualification method employs fault injection as a validation method to increase confidence in the tool. Our case study will help to avoid many of the new pitfalls that can arise when attempting to realize standard-compliant development.

Requirement decomposition and testability in development of safety-critical automotive components

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

We encountered an error while loading the panel. Please try refreshing the page.

Something went wrong

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

Anyone with the link can view this chat. You can switch it back to private anytime.

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

Andreas Wallin

Author Tools

Chat about Author

Papers

Requirement decomposition and testability in development of safety-critical automotive components