Supporting tests of autonomy: Autonomy Requirements Tester (ART)

The Autonomy Requirements Tester (ART) is a tool suite under development to assist with the construction of requirements, the planning of requirements verification tests, the execution of those tests, and the tracking of test results, with an emphasis on requirements for system autonomy. We designed the full ART system and sketched a concept of operations. As an initial stage of development, we prototyped only the Test Runner portion of ART that executes a test script and records results in a fashion that enables users to see how well the autonomy requirements have been tested. The Test Runner takes advantage of the Core Flight Software (cFS) publish-subscribe architecture so that the test can be plugged into the architecture along with the app being tested, thus no changes to the app are required to run the test. Implications of linking requirements, test procedures, and test reports are discussed for integration testing, reuse of software modules, test driven development, software certification, and improved stakeholder communication. Future directions of this line of research are also discussed.