November 10, 2010 -- Today's complexity of embedded systems is steadily increasing. The growing number of components in a system and the increased communication and synchronization of all components requires reliable verification, validation and testing of each component as well as the system as a whole. Considering today's cost sensitivity it is important to find errors as early as possible and to increase the degree of test automation to avoid quality losses because of the increased cost pressure.

Test methods like static code analysis, memory analysis or unit tests offer a high degree of test automation. These techniques are not sufficient when it comes to functional defects: States where the application does not behave as specified. The degree of automation finding these types of errors is mainly limited to code review. The following presents solution how metrics extracted from the specification can be used to increase test automation for complex embedded systems.

By Markus Winterholer. (Winterholer is with Cadence Design Systems, Inc.)