Journal Article
Virtualized Fault Injection Methods in the Context of the ISO 26262 Standard
2012-04-16
2012-01-0001
Software quality is one of the biggest concerns of the automotive industry. Releasing a product with defects and having a recall can have enormous direct and indirect cost for an automotive OEM. In order to improve software quality is not sufficient to only increase the number of tests. It is extremely important to establish more sophisticated tests that can cover corner cases which are not unveiled during normal operation. Typically, corner cases are very difficult to test as those are often only triggered when the underlying hardware fails or the software gets unexpectedly corrupted. How to test those cases, to make sure that the right SW routines are executed and that the system moves back on time to a safe state? Fault-injection methods are typically used to cover a subset of these tests. However, there are quite some limitations on how effective and cost efficient existing methods can be applied for a more extensive coverage.