The adaptation of test-driven software processes to industrial automation engineering

Software components provide an increasing part of added value in automation systems and become more complex to construct and test. Test-driven development (TDD) of software systems has been successfully used for agile development of business software systems. Test cases guide the system implementation and can be executed automatically after software changes (continuous integration & build strategy). However, TDD processes need to be adapted to control automation systems engineering, where real-world systems are challenging to model and to test automatically. In this paper we introduce an adapted TDD process from the business software engineering domain to industrial automation engineering. We identify a set of UML models that enable the systematic derivation of test cases. Based on an initial empirical study we evaluate the adapted TDD process based on an industrial use case to identify strength and limitation of this approach. Major results of the study were that UML models enabled effective test case derivation in the study context.