Shortening Test Case Execution Time for Embedded Software

Cost-effectiveness is perhaps the most driving characteristic behind a test automation approach aiming to spend less time in testing a software and finding as many faults as possible. Many research papers have been addressing the automation of test case generation activity by means of models, methods, tools and frameworks. However, in a practical software development environment it is not reasonable to automate test case generation if it is not possible to automatically execute them stimulating the software and capturing actual results. This paper presents the results obtained by using a tool, QSEE-TAS, that automates both test execution and test process documentation generation. It also presents the main features of such a tool. Three different embedded software products for computers of scientific experiments of satellites under development at National Institute for Space Research (INPE) were selected for showing the usefulness of QSEE-TAS compared with previous testing execution tools used at INPE.