Darts: an automated feature test system for a digital central office switching system

The automated testing system described herein was developed to support feature testing of a Digital Central Office Switching System, the Siemens EWSD (System Under Test-SUT). The SUT is a large real-time central office telephone system combining hardware, software and firmware components that have been developed for telephony applications in a large central office environment. The need to provide an automated testing system for embedded software becomes apparent when it is recognized that it may take from 5 to 75 minutes to manually setup, execute and evaluate a single test on the SUT. Also as new features are added to the SUT the number of tests necessary to perform feature and regression testing must be continuously expanded in order to provide the required amount of test coverage. Additional time is also needed to perform re-execution of some tests for debugging and validation of a fault correction. If, however, tests are automated, multiple re-executions of each test increases the amount of regression testing which can be performed and dramatically improves the quality of feature testing on the SUT and by extension the quality of the software on the SUT