Structural Coverage Analysis Methods

1. Introduction

Software is the crucial thing which is used everywhere in our society from education to medical and business. Some of the devices are operatable on basis of softwares. In order to increase the quality, software testing is important. Testing is one of the most important phase of software life cycle. Software testing is a process of finding errors to reduce the damage and improve the reliability, dependency and quality of software (Zander, Schieferdecker, & Mosterman, 2011). Different standards are provided to check the criticality of software.

From the last few decades, control and coverage have been employed in most of functional areas of aerospace industries including navigation, flight control and other avionics softwares. Testing of developed code is core part of software development to protect civil aviation safety and reliability of software for airborne equipments. It is most important to check the correctness and accuracy of code for any software to avoid software failures and accidents. Each requirement contains one or more test-cases to prove its correctness.

DO-178B/C and DO-278 are used to assure safety of avionics software and control systems. DO-178B/C provides guidance and standards for software development, verification, configuration management and the interface to approval authorities. It prescribes a procedure which is being followed in the software development of airborne systems by developers. Based on a safety criteria DO-178B provides different levels which are shown in Table 1.

2. Testing Techniques

Testing involves mainly two techniques such as black box testing and white box testing.