ATAC

Project results

ATAC’s overarching goal was always to push the functional, safety and security requirements coverage envelope while minimising the number of test cases required to achieve the necessary degree of coverage and confidence in the software, hence greatly reducing the required testing effort for both the fully automated and remaining manual test cases. To ensure that the researched solutions and tools solve real industry needs and to maximise their potential application in other settings, all R&I activities were anchored around a jointly defined set of industrial case studies in different application domains. During the project, a flexible and heterogeneous portfolio of different tools and methodologies was developed to cover the needs of these different application domains as it was soon recognised that one-size-fits all approach would be less than optimal.

Exploitation

During ATAC, Barco’s Collaborative Media Team developed a framework that provided better support for tracing system requirements down to detailed requirements, linking them with corresponding test-cases on all levels of the V-model. This framework reduced the software verification and validation effort by 20% and has since been rolled out company-wide thanks to this success.

Bittium Wireless developed an automated VoIP network test tool in ATAC and introduced a production testing platform for a Bittium product family, both of which Bittium has continued to develop after the project’s end in 2014. Today, the automated VoIP network test tool is used in Bittium as a standard testing framework in all VoIP based products and the company automated more than 90% of its functional testing for VoIP based products resulting in significant verification cost savings.

Bombardier’s prototype tool developed in ATAC minimised the number of test vectors required to demonstrate sufficient code coverage, massively decreasing the time needed by testers to demonstrate these coverage objectives. In addition, the tool gave a figure on the achieved code coverage by testing when the automatically tool-generated test vectors were used. Maximatecc collaborated closely with Bombardier and ATAC has made it possible to develop their products and services for the simulation of embedded systems and applications, especially their SimTecc simulation platform. The flexibility of SimTecc is that it can be applied both at component level for module testing and at application level for testing complete machines and vehicles, e.g. a complete train.

The ATAC results have enabled Valmet Automation to run over 1500 automated tests in less than one hour, where manual testing would take days and be much more error-prone. In ATAC, Ericsson automated millions of test cases that are executed daily in different test systems, and test code is now delivered together with software code and executed with every change to the system.

ATAC has been a key ingredient in the formation and establishment of the Software Testing Laboratory (STL) research group at Mälardalen University, one of the largest of its kind in Sweden. Kaunas University of Technology founded one of the largest mobile application testing laboratories in the Baltic States.