D-MINT

An innovative edge model-based testing technology for testing and assuring the quality of software-intense technical systems

There are more and more possible applications for software-intense systems. The requirements on such systems increase and that enlarges their complexity. That is why, it is essential to develop such technologies within short time and with decreasing error-proneness.

The D-MINT consortium will develop with 27 partners a new approach to model-based testing which combines various system aspects and system models during test generation. Every partner provides branch-specific requirements, concepts and ideas. The results are combined in a technology for automated software-engineering.

On the following sites you can learn more about current challenges of software-engineering, the main goals of D-MINT and the deployed technologies. When you are interested in this or related topics please contact us.

Final Report (in german): Entwicklung und Erprobung innovativer Technologien des modellbasierten Tests: PDF-DOWNLOAD (Fraunhofer Verlag)

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Award

The ITEA2 project D-MINT on Deployment of Model-Based Technologies to Industrial Testing won the ITEA Exhibition Award 2009. FOKUS contributed to D-Mint as research Partner and coordinator of the German consortium.

During the Final Project Review Meeting on 24.11.2009 in Espoo, Finland, the project was rated Excellent.

More information on d-mint.org or on the ITEA2 Homepage.

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Goals

The following major results are expected from this project:

• Packaged methods and techniques for model-based testing processes to enable comparable developments beyond the selected technologies and tools of this project including guidelines and experience reports derived from the case studies.
• Industrial demonstrators showing the practical and efficient use of model-based testing resulting from case studies in automotive, finance, industrial automation, manufacturing equipment, railways, and telecommunication. 
• Tool chain for test generation, test refinement, distributed test process control and test quality analysis including new and extended tool components for commercial tools from partners and/or for off-the-shelf tools.
• Case study experiences and evaluation results that prove the efficiency of the developed processes and methods empirically
• New algorithms for architecture-driven test modelling and test generation with industrial scale
• Extended set of test patterns for software-intense systems in the domains of automotive, finance, industrial automation, manufacturing equipment, railways, and telecommunication
• An exploitation plan in yearly revisions. It will be carefully planned and starts at the beginning of the project. This includes analysis of market potential and focusing/defining the market with regards to the vertical, horizontal, regional, and company-size dimensions.

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Technology

The D-MINT innovations will be in the following five key areas:

1. System-architecture-driven testing:
A new approach for model-based testing will be acquired where the system architecture serves as an integrator of heterogeneous component models and where test patterns serve as a guide for test generation along industrial expertise. The architecture-oriented model allows us to combine aspects, relations and models of different kinds of components. (more)

2. Model-based integrated system and test development:
There will be developed concepts for the management of requirements and test-cases consistency for distributed and compositional system structures. Models on different levels and from different perspectives including architectural, hierarchical models will help us to manage system development and tests for systems consisting of huge amounts of heterogeneous components.

3. Automated test-case refinement in sync with system model refinements:
We will develop an automatic concept to let test-cases keep pace with the refinement of models during design. We will model transformers that refine the tests. Furthermore, we will give emphasis to the practicability of generated tests by investigating means to steer test generation with proven test patterns and the ability to control test generation via explicit user interaction.

4. Automated consistency checks of requirements, models and test cases:
We will address consistency by keeping track of the relations between requirements, system models and test models (and parts thereof) on a semantic and not just syntactic base. This means that not only the sole fact that model elements relate to each other, but also the transformers being applied are traced as well as the history of element evolution.

5. Statistically controlled model-based test processes:
Statistical methods should be applied to model-based test processes to measure, control, and optimize process and system qualities. Therefore, D-MINT will develop concepts, methods, and tools for requirements formalization towards probabilistic models, probabilistic test modelling, test-case generation (from probabilistic models of system use and behaviour), and statistical methods for analysis of test results that apply to domain-specific composed software-intensive systems.

Abb. Architekturgetriebenes modellbasiertes Testen

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Partners

The project is structured in five content related workgroups that are treated and coordinated by different partners.

Technology partners

The technology partners iXtronics, PikeTec and Testing Technologies provide platforms for testing and modelling for technical systems that are integrated in the D-MINT edge model-based testing technology and are extended in a applicable manner.

The work of iXtronics GmbH focuses on services, methods, and tools for the model-supported design of mechatronic systems. Main objects of products and services of iXtronics are reduction of time and costs that are set in development and the early assurance of progress results.
In this work package iXtronics will integrate parts of its software CAMeL-View for the development of mechatronic systems into the tool chain developed within this work package. Since technical systems are going to be tested the iXtronics hardware CAMeL-View TestRig will also play an important role and must also be partly integrated. Furthermore, iXtronics will support ABB (industrial automation case study) and DC (automotive case study) in the specification and realization of the industrial case studies and demonstrators.

 

PikeTec offers a wide range of consulting services and innovative tools for software development of embedded systems. The technical goals of PikeTec are to provide optimisation opportunities to both the quality of the development process and the resulting products.

In the D-MINT project PikeTec develops test tools and test methods and is primary responsible for die adjustment of tools and methods for the model-based test in the automobile section. Priority is given to the support of the consistency of architectural test infrastructure from model on the loop tests over software in the loop tests up to hardware in the loop tests. Grounded on application configurations of control units, concepts and prototypes are developed for the generation of model-based tests with consideration of the different system models for vehicle functions.

 

Testing Technologies IST GmbH (short: TestingTech) develops and markets highly innovative test development tool series, solutions and services based on the test specification and implementation language TTCN-3. Testing Tech offers under the brand TTworkbench a highly integrated test development and execution tool series for a wide range of industry domains, including the telecommunications, automotive and financial domains.

In D-MINT Testing Tech will primarily contribute to the development of tools for model-supported testing. TTworkbench will advance the integration of UML2 and U2TP into its product series. In addition, Testing Tech, Fraunhofer Fokus, and other partners cooperate for the extension of U2TP for embedded systems (U2TPes). TestingTech contributes to the management of test configurations.

 

Research partners

The research partners Fraunhofer FOKUS and IESE essentially acquire methods of architectural test development and qualitive and quantitative evaluation of tests and functional and non-functional product features.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS) conducts research in system development technologies, communication and cooperation systems, and intelligent multimedia systems. The work of FOKUS is undertaken by five Competence Centres. The Competence Centre on “Modelling and Testing of System and Service Solutions” (MOTION) of FOKUS will participate in this project. A main stream of MOTION’s research includes new approaches towards efficient model-based distributed, performance and interoperability testing, to monitoring and measurement of communication flows, and to an efficient test suite factory.

FOKUS will coordinate the German subproject and will be responsible for the realisation of prototypes of chosen concepts. A major concern of FOKUS is to develop an extension of U2TP for Embedded Systems (U2TPes), new methods for model-based test generation, and test quality analysis.

 

The Services of the Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (Fraunhofer IESE) range from case-oriented consulting to setting up new structures and processes in software development. The service portfolio includes support for introducing continuous improvement programs as well as for selecting, adapting, evaluating, and introducing innovative software development approaches.

IESE as a research partner in this project will provide the partners with empirical methods for conducting case studies and will support their analysis. Furthermore, dissemination of the results will be forwarded by IESE.

 

Transferpartner

The transfer partners DaimlerChrysler, ABB and Nokia are essentially responsible for the case studies that demonstrate and evaluate methods and techniques.

In the D-MINT project the Software Engineering Lab department “Methods & Tools” of the DaimlerChrysler group takes part. It provides research, consulting, methods and tools for the engineering of software-intense systems to in-house customers (i.e. developers) at Mercedes and Chrysler. A strength of this department is research and technologies for testing software-intense systems.

DC will drive a case study in the automotive domain. This case study will focus on integration testing of several components. An automotive demonstrator will be build up to apply and evaluate the test technologies provided by D-MINT under real circumstances. On national level DaimlerChrysler operates as the manager of the work package concerned with German case studies. On international level DC manages the work package for all case studies.

 

ABB is a global leader in power and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve their performance while lowering environmental impact. The ABB Group of companies operates in around 100 countries and employs about 104,000 people. ABB focuses on two core businesses: Power Technologies and Automation Technologies.

For an industrial case study ABB will supply its knowledge, experience and a device in the field of plant automation using so-called instruments (e.g. pressure, temperature or flow sensors) to evaluate model-based testing technologies. Together with iXtronics and Fraunhofer IESE, ABB will deliver an industry relevant example and an environment to enable a technical as well as a non-technical audience to experience and understand the advantages of model-based testing. Principles and methods of model-based testing will be explained by this practical example.

 

Nokia is the world leader in mobile communications. Backed by its experience, innovation, user-friendliness and secure solutions, the company has become the leading supplier of mobile phones and a leading supplier of mobile, fixed and IP networks.

Nokia will provide the Project Manager for this project.and will be in charge of supervising the project and monitoring the overall progress. Nokia will contribute as a case study provider in the telecommunications domain and will establish requirements for model-based testing methods.

 

Other Partners

Development, dissemination, and application of the results are mainly conducted by Inspire.

INSPIRE is active in the area of Project and Innovation Management and equity finance. INSPIRE has built up a high confidence level to evaluate and estimate innovations, technologies, research, and finally new inventions.

INSPIRE will start the basic market and competition analysis and most focus will be put on finding methods and tools to document significant measurable benefits for the project (cost reduction, cost structure optimisation, quality improvement, etc.). INSPIRE will contribute by offering detailed knowledge for setting up the industrial case studies (especially the automotive one) and demonstrators. It also supports the exploitation of the results of the D-MINT project.

 

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More about

With the ever increasing penetration of software-intense systems into technical, business and social areas, not only the requirements on system functionalities and features, but also the requirements on system quality and reliability increase. With the increasing requirements, the complexity of software-intense systems is growing – combined with an increasing error-proneness which is also related to shortened development times.

Illustration of deployed models in the development of automotive-systems

To remain competitive capable and cost-efficient technologies for development and testing are required. The currently existing technologies have still many deficits:

• Current model-based test approaches lack industrial scale and can not be used in full range of industrial practice.
• They are also limited to selected aspects of system models.
• A typical software-intense system is developed as a composition of software components, electrical components, and/or mechanical components each of which uses different modelling techniques.
• Because of different deployed modelling languages the individual system components are not consistent to each other.
• Development of test technologies causes great costs.
• The development needs much time.

Model-based testing technologies offer the potential for a high degree of automation to increase effectiveness and efficiency because test cases can be derived mechanically.
D-MINT will provide partners and European industry with a new leading edge model-based testing technology that enables the testing of software-intense technical systems and the assurance of their quality. These technologies allow the production of high quality software-intense systems at reduced expenditure in terms of time and money.

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