Abstract
Validating the behaviour of commercial off-the-shelf components and of interactions between them is a complex, and often a manual task. Treated like any other software product, a software component for a robot system is often tested only by the component developer. Test sets and results are often not available to the system builder, who may need to verify functional and non-functional claims made by the component. Availability of test records is key in establishing compliance and thus selection of the most suitable components for system composition. To provide empirically verifiable test records consistent with a component’s claims would greatly improve the overall safety and dependability of robotic software systems in open-ended environments. Addi-tionally, a test and validation suite for a system built from the model package of that system empirically codifies its behavioural claims. In this paper, we present the “SmartTS methodology”: A component-based and model-driven approach to generate model-bound test-suites for software components and systems. SmartTS methodology and tooling are not restricted to the robotics domain. The core contribution of SmartTS is support for test and validation suites derived from the model packages of components and systems. The test-suites in SmartTS are tightly bound to an application domain’s data and service models as defined in the RobMoSys (EU H2020 project) compliant SmartMDSD toolchain. SmartTS does not break component encapsulation for system builders while providing them complete access to the way that component is tested and simulated.
Highlights
A software product may be difficult to understand and modify, it might be prone to misuse and difficult to use, it might not integrate well with another piece of software and it might work on only a particular machine and only under some very hard assumptions
To the best of our knowledge, there is an absence of a wholistic model-driven approach towards Component-Based Software Development (CBSD) for robotic systems, that integrates support for test and validation suites6 within the model-package7 of a robotic software component or system
SmartMDSD toolchain [50], [51] is a RobMoSys [40] compliant model-driven tooling for component-based robotic software development based on the SMARTSOFT methodology [55]
Summary
A software product may be difficult to understand and modify, it might be prone to misuse and difficult to use, it might not integrate well with another piece of software and it might work on only a particular machine and only under some very hard assumptions. Unless one looks under the hood to measure software on these parameters, the quality of the software can not be judged purely on the basis that it works and was delivered on time [1]–[3]. A good software product can be qualified as testable if it performs well on the following quality parameters as suggested by Boehm et al [1].
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