Take a look at the new version of this page: [ beta version ]. Tell us what you think.

ABSTRACT

Reliability Accessibility and Serviceability (RAS) software deals with hardware-related processes that typically include manual operations such as replacing components. The necessity to perform manual operations inhibits automated tests, reduces the scope of unit testing, and makes it challenging to create a regression test suite for RAS.

We define Small Scale Simulation (S³), a novel and cost effective type of testing harness whose abstraction level lies between full simulation and mock objects. We describe our experience in creating, deploying, using, and maintaining a small scale simulation system for testing the RAS subsystem of an enterprise storage controller. By replacing physical operations with logical commands, this small scale simulation system enables early release of code related to new hardware feature, and the creation of an automatic regression test suite.

REFERENCES

• 1: Michael Feathers, Working Effectively with Legacy Code, Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2004
• 2: Feathers, Michael (2005). "Working with Feedback". Working effectively with legacy code. NJ: Prentice Hall. p. 9 et seq. ISBN 0-13-117705-2.
• 3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mock_object. Accessed February 2009.
• 4: Simon Stewart. Approaches to Mocking. http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2004/02/11/mocks.html#Approaches, O'Reilly Media. Accessed February 2009.
• 5: Bruce Wile , John Goss , Wolfgang Roesner, Comprehensive Functional Verification: The Complete Industry Cycle (Systems on Silicon), Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 2005
• 6: EasyMock. http://www.easymock.org/. Accessed February 2009.
• 7: jMock. http://www.jmock.org/. Accessed February 2009.
• 8: Mockpp http://mockpp.sourceforge.net/. Accessed February 2009.
• 9: CMock. http://sourceforge.net/projects/cmock/. Accessed February 2009.
• 10: Capers Jones, Applied software measurement: assuring productivity and quality, McGraw-Hill, Inc., New York, NY, 1991
• 11: IEEE Standard for Software Unit Testing: An American National Standard, ANSI/IEEE Std. 1008-1987. IEEE Standards: Software Engineering, Volume Two: Process Standards; 1999.
• 12: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_testing. Accessed February 2009.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging

General Terms:
Management, Reliability, Verification

Keywords:
RAS, S³, mock objects, small scale simulation, software testing