O Framework ConBaT: suporte a testes baseados em contexto para sistemas desenvolvidos em Arduino

Abstract

Embedded systems, especially context-aware embedded systems, whose behaviour is determined by information constantly obtained from different kinds of sensors, can be very hard to be tested. That happens due to the nature of their input data, which can be hard to replicate, and also because of their limited resources. Thus, software testing techniques that may work for “common” software can be insufficient for this kind of system. Tools created to support the testing activity of embedded systems are often limited to unit tests, and avoid having to deal with data received from sensors, which is actually the foundation of context-aware systems’ behaviour. Those that support context simulation, like event-based approaches, generally abstract the translation of raw sensor data into useful information (the events), leaving this stage out of the tests. To support software testing on context-aware embedded systems, this work proposes (i) a time-sensitive and application-independent format to store context data variation over time, called context file, and (ii) the framework ConBaT (Context Based Testing), that can be used to collect context data, generating context files, as well as to create context based tests for Arduino systems, supporting time-sensitive sensor simulation.