Tool Support for Automated Traceability of Test/Code Artifacts in Embedded Software Systems

Development, testing and maintenance of software for embedded systems is a complex task. Analysis of the traceability between different software artifacts (e.g., source code, test code and requirements) is an enabling capability for better development, testing and maintenance of software systems. However, there is a general lack of tool support for automating traceability analysis for embedded systems. We demonstrate in this paper how to extend an existing unit test and test coverage framework to produce a hard-ware assisted tool framework capable of automatically deriving and visualizing traceability links between source code and test code artifacts. To demonstrate the applicability and usefulness of the framework, we report the application of the framework on realistic embedded software for vehicle gear transmission control built and deployed on the Analog Devices Blackfin (R) ADSP-5XX family of DSP processors.