moviTest: A Test Environment dedicated to multi-core embedded architectures

The major shift towards multi-core hardware brought additional complexity to the software development process and made software testing even more important. Movidius Test Environment (moviTest) is a test environment which addresses these challenges, a novelty, especially in the embedded field. It can be used for generating/running automatic tests, which target heterogeneous multi-core architecture ASICs or simulators. The tests may be intended for both hardware and software validation. The environment offers key features for writing test cases, aimed to validate heterogenous parallelized software. The proprietary test script language allows - by usage of specific directives - the inclusion of target-specific assembly language and/or C/C++ language code and the loading/running of the resulting binaries on the desired heterogeneous targets. To support the different build processes, of each language and associated target, the user may specify multiple tool-chains which will be used by the environment. If the tests do not use all core targets, and they do not share the same resources, of the targeted embedded system, the scripting language provides the possibility to overlap multiple tests to make use of all targets simultaneously, thus considerably decreasing the testing time. Other important features like multi-core debug information collection are also present in moviTest. Experimental results show the usefulness of the previously enumerated features.