Maximizing Test Asset Re-Use across MiL, SiL, and HiL Development Platforms 2010-01-0660

The use of automated test tools for automotive ECU development has been increasing in recent years, in particular for software testing, system validation and verification, and regression testing. One of the challenges for the ECU development community is that test cases created at a specific phase of software development cannot be easily re-used upstream or downstream in the development process. For example, test cases developed for a model-in-the-loop (MiL) test environment can not be easily re-used on a hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) tests system. This results in significant costs associated with re-engineering test cases and/or poor software quality. At ETAS, we understand that a critical aspect of test case design is the ability to share and re-use test scripts on different HiL hardware platforms and across different development environments (e.g. MiL, SiL, and HiL).

In this paper, we present a novel framework and toolset which enables maximum test asset re-use in embedded software and control system development. The solution allows engineers to create test cases that are test bench independent, development phase independent, test language independent, and ECU variant independent. In other words, test cases can be created in different scripting languages, parameterized for different ECU variants, and re-used on different hardware platforms or development environments (i.e. MiL, SiL or HiL). We will also present case studies that highlight the benefits of the approach.