Designing generic safety test cases for airborne software

Airborne electronic equipment is a typical safety-critical system. Software safety testing is very important and in order to ensure the safety of the software and improve the effectiveness of software safety testing, we have researched on the design of generic airborne software safety test case based on the idea of test case reuse and generic failure. The research is according to the standards of NASA Software Safety Guidebook and etc. This paper sorted out the generic safety requirements which could be dynamically tested and validated for the airborne software. The generic safety requirements were classified to eight categories according to their contents. Based on the characteristics of each category of generic requirements, the generic test case structure was developed and different design intents of the test cases were clearly described. A set of representatively generic testing cases were designed with three aspects: coverage of the normal requirements, robust testing, and combination of internal conditions for each generic requirement, and the requirements of concretization were also described. Finally, a practical application in the testing project was given as an example to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method with designed generic test case set.