User-driven automatic test-case generation for DTV/STB reliable functional verification

In recent years Digital TV receivers (DTV) and Set- Top Boxes (STB) have been advancing in terms of new functionalities they offer to the end-users. This has mainly been triggered by the appearance of new multimedia formats and applications needed to be adequately handled by the DTV/STB. In such complex system within the environment consisting of wide range of non-interactive as well as interactive applications and services for television, internet, gamming, healthcare, surveillance, etc., efficient and reliable DTV functional verification becomes highly necessary and challenging task. Since efficient DTV testing is considered as one of the most important issues for the reduced time-to-market, its optimization is of crucial importance to the DTV manufacturing process. Having in mind the end-users as the main target of the DTV, optimal test generation process must also include estimated usage-profiles in addition to the pre-defined DTV designed specification. This is especially important considering new emerging multimedia technologies for DTV which are not yet fully standardized and evaluated, and which exact employment (from the point of end-users) is not known in advance. In this paper we propose a novel approach for user driven test-case generation that would enable adequate and efficient testing of the DTV/STB in different development stages before reaching the market, i.e., the end-users. The proposed user driven approach provides optimal test-case generation in terms of both test execution time and adequacy according to the real end-user DTV functional DTV operation and quality of experience (QoE). This is obtained by incorporating a novel design and selection scheme for test-cases generation based on the modeled end-users most required functional operations on the DTV/STB under test and its expectations of it.