Aviation Embedded Airborne Software Test Automation, Quality Assurance Techniques

There is no doubt that the aviation embedded airborne software (called "airborne software" in short bellow) has already become the core of air vehicle, especially the core of advanced fighter of new generation military equipment. The application of software engineering technology and methods rapidly improves the functional characteristics and performance characteristics of the airborne software, making it possible to develop such large and complex embedded system; at the mean time, the quality of airborne software is facing serious challenges:safety problems, delayed schedule and cost increase caused by software deficiency make the stakeholders of aviation programs pay careful attention to the quality of airborne software.With strict standardization, effective execution and strong support to engineering information reuse and reengineering, airborne software automatic test is in favored by the aviation field. Introduction of software automatic test to airborne software is the new developing direction of aviation embedded software field. Also it is the optimum solution to solve the server quality problems airborne software is facing now.Airborne software automatic test itself is a very complicated process. First of all, it should be synchronized with the life cycle of airborne software to fulfill flow automatization; secondly, it should set up an automatic environment that accord with the airborne software developing. Because of the specialty of airborne software development and the unique test requirement to aviation system, the solution to commercial software test automatization is difficult to be applied here; thirdly, it should reduce undesired affects to airborne software test automatization by human factors, at the same time, take advantages of innovation of software test engineers to ensure the quality of airborne software.In general, as an important process in the life cycle of airborne software, the structure and operation quality of airborne software automatic test directly affects the quality of airborne software. The quality warranty of airborne software automatic test not only focuses on modeling the quality of airborne software automatic test, but also controls the quality of operation procedures of the airborne software automatic test; even it influences the maturity of organization's software capability maturity. Facing the developing mission of a new generation fighter, aviation software automatic test will act more actively.