Production-Testing of Embedded Systems with Aspects

A test harness plays an important role in the development of any embedded system. Although the harness can be excluded from final products, its architecture should support maintenance and reuse, especially in the context of testing product families. Aspect-orientation is a new technique for software architecture that should enable scattered and tangled code to be addressed in a modular fashion, thus facilitating maintenance and reuse. However, the design of interworking between object-oriented baseline architecture and aspects attached on top of it is an issue, which has not been solved conclusively. For industrial-scale use, guidelines on what to implement with objects and what with aspects should be derived. In this paper, we introduce a way to reflect the use of aspect-orientation to production testing software of embedded systems. Such piece of a test harness is used to smoke test the proper functionality of a manufactured device. The selection of suitable implementation technique is based on variance of devices to be tested, with aspects used as means for increased flexibility. Towards the end of the paper, we also present the results of our experiments in the Symbian OS context that show some obstacles in the current tool support that should be addressed before further case studies can be conducted.