Flexible integration testing of automotive ECUs by combining AUTOSAR and XCP

Increasing functionality and complexity of current automotive ECUs raise demands on development and testing its software. The more software components being included, the more effort on integration these components into one ECU has to be spend. Additionally, new standards like the ISO/DIS 26262 raise the requirements of testing safety critical components like an airbag-ECU due to functional safety. Trying to retain test coverage on rising functionality of new ECUs compared to older one will lead to longer test periods. The complexity of the integration phase will be intensified, if more then one supplier is integrating software into one ECU. In this paper we present our way to extend the scope of testing software of an ECU using the XCP in combination with an AUTOSAR compliant software basis. This enables flexible instrumentation and testing of an ECU during the whole process from software development at the beginning to acceptance testing at the end. The provided techniques help to simplify instrumenting an ECU for debugging and testing purposes during the whole lifetime. The on-the-fly configuration of XCP is additionally reducing the overhead of preparing an ECU to special test-cases and thus saving valuable time.