Chasing rainbows: improving software testing in the real world

When releasing a new consumer product, the anticipated profits can be slashed by being late to market or having poor quality. Companies are keen to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of testing, to reduce their lead time and to be confident of the quality. However, it might appear that progress in the deployment of new approaches has been agonizingly slow. In practice, with the rapid evolution in the technology and business of consumer electronics, a major challenge is to anticipate the testing needs of the future while addressing the detailed issues that hamper the adoption of new approaches. The presentation will give an overview of how the software in embedded consumer products, together with its development approach, has evolved over the last decade, with the shift of signal processing from analogue hardware to software and from monolithic development organizations to ones that integrate and test components developed by others. Integration testing, one of the least well-understood areas, becomes crucial and there will be illustrations of the insight that testability can give into how architectures must be constrained to ensure that this testing can be effective. The presentation will also give examples of the successful introduction of new test technology, current trials of model-checking techniques and the new testing challenges posed by the introduction of the increasing complexity of embedded systems with systems-on-chip and their network-on-chip interconnects.