Design of a system for software testing and debugging for multiprocessor avionics systems

The debugging and testing of commercial software constitutes a substantial portion of the development time and, by most estimates, over fifty percent of the overall cost of software development. For critical applications, such as avionics, complete testing is extremely important. However, as multiprocessor software solutions find their way into these critical applications as a means of increasing performance and reliability, the need for both debugging and testing tools increases dramatically. This paper focuses on the gathering of accurate run-time information providing support for both debugging and testing of embedded multi-processor systems by employing runtime identification of "simple events" and post-execution identification of "compound events." Additionally, we propose a novel way of combining specification based (black-box) system testing and automatic monitoring to substantially reduce the complexity, tedium, and cost of complete structural (white-box) testing.