Generation of reliability test data for real-time embedded software based on the usage profile

Software reliability testing is one of the important tasks in software reliability engineering, from which the failure data can be used to evaluate and validate the software reliability. The traditional profile, i.e. the operation profile, is not usually applicable to real-time embedded software, in which the operations are relevant and the constraint conditions between operations are very complex. In this paper a usage profile in network graph form is presented, which is an extension for the operational profile. With the usage profile, the operation sequences, the constraint conditions and the real time characters can be expressed closely to actual usage scenario, so that generating software reliability test data from the usage profile is more accurate and quick. To generate reliability test data automatically, a formal modeling method and a software tool named TCS are presented.