Model-Based Testing and Validation with Reactis®

4.2  System Testing

After software testing, the next step in certifying a system is to compile the code and test the resulting executable on the platform, including the target microprocessor and associated system software, on which it will eventually be deployed. Such testing is often referred to as system, or integration, testing.

System testing typically involves the use of hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation tools. These HIL tools are expensive, and thus using them as efficiently as possible can promote significant cost savings.

Provided that system-level models are given in Simulink / Stateflow, Reactis can greatly facilitate system testing. As in the case of software testing, test engineers can use Reactis Tester and Reactis Simulator to generate thorough yet compact test suites from these models and feed the test data into their HIL environments in order to check system behavior against model behavior. The compactness of Reactis-generated tests means that expensive HIL hardware need not be tied up with long test runs in order to get precise insights into system behavior.

How the Reactis-generated test data may be used in HIL testing will in general depend on the HIL environment used. HIL tools typically provide a scripting facility for defining test runs. Reactis exports test data in several easy to parse formats (comma separated value, CSV, for example) to simplify the writing of scripts to read Reactis-generated test data into an HIL environment.