Safety Critical Software and Software Testing (1992~1994): The CONTESSE project, UK DTI/SERC funded in the SAFEIT programme.

The project was concerned with testing safety critical software and safety cases. Two tasks of the projects were fulfilled. One is on test adequacy and test coverage measurements. The other is on software testing via environment simulation. The main contributions to the project include:

  1. A method for testing safety critical software for its ability of dealing with hazardous situations. The method starts with the development of a simulator of software environment at normal operation state, then applies program transformation techniques with fault injection rules to the simulator to automatically generate simulators of the environment system in hazardous situations. The fault injection rules and the uses of these rules are derived from a hazard analysis of the environment system, in particular, the fault-tree analysis of system failure modes.

  2. A theoretical analysis of the foundation of software testing via environment simulation. Problems in test adequacy and simulation accuracy are identified and studied. A language called STOC for the specification of software environment systems is proposed, which is capable of specifying time constraint related properties and probabilistic properties of a complicated system.

Related Publications:

Zhu, H., Specification and evaluation of software environment simulators for testing safety critical software, Proc. CADTED’96, June 1996, Beijing, pp193~198.

Zhu, H. and Jin, L., A specification language of stochastic real-time systems, Proc. SEKE'97, Madrid, Spain, June 1997, pp358~365.

Zhu, H. and Hall, P., Injecting faults into environment simulators for testing safety critical software, Dependable Computing: Proc. of EDCC'94, Berlin, Lecture Notes in Comp. Sci. Vol. 852, Springer-Verlag, 1994.

Zhu, H., and Hall, P., Testing protection software through simulation of failures, Proc. of International Conference on Real Time Systems, Paris, Jan., 1994. pp155-170.

Zhu, H., Czachur, K., Cockram, T., Hall, P., and May, J., Testing safety critical software via simulating failures of the environment system, Proc. of the Safety and Reliability Society Conference, Cheshire, UK., Oct., 1994.

Zhu., H., Hall., P., May, J., and Cockram, T., Knowledge engineering helps testing protection software, Proc. of 6'th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, Jurmala, Latvia, Oct. 1994.

Zhu, H., Program transformation applied to the simulation of system failure processes, Proc. of The European Simulation Symposium, Vol. 2, pp325-329, Istanbul, Turkey, Oct. 1994.

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