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Nowadays, vehicle integrators (OEMs) put over fifty different control units (ECUs) in a vehicle. The AUTOSAR standard for Basic Software (BSW) describes in detail how the communication software components should be implemented in order to enable these ECUs to seamless work together. When integrating ECUs with BSW from different vendors, one needs to ensure that the standard is interpreted in the same way. This requires testing, but the traditional testing approach of manually crafted tests has failed due to the enormous configurability of the software. By using a novel approach based on automatically generated test cases from models and configurations, we solve this testing problem. In addition to the obvious requirement that an acceptance test strategy must have high coverage with respect to specification requirements, it is also very important that the tests have a low life cycle cost (LCC). A low LCC implies as well low cost for developing the test as a high maintainability.

The AUTOSAR standard is a de facto software standard for the automotive industry, being used for existing and future safety-related functions. The new International Standard, ISO 26262 1, dedicated for automotive functional-safety, which can be viewed as an adaptation of the IEC 61508 2 onto automotive applications, will be applied to the design and implementation of safety-related systems containing electrical, electronic and programmable electronic components, so called E/E/PE systems, i.e. also on AUTOSAR software. This combination opens up several advantages and challenges for the design of safety related systems with respect to platform software. One main reason is that AUTOSAR is designed without a specific application in mind. Thus AUTOSAR must be configurable to meet changing requirements from an application point of view as well as safety requirements.