Combined Simulation and Testing Based on Standard UML Models

The development of complex software and embedded systems is usually composed of a series of design, implementation, and testing phases. Challenged by their continuously increasing complexity and high-performance requirements, model-driven development approaches are gaining in popularity. Modeling languages like UML (Unified Modeling Language) cope with the system complexity and also allow for advanced analysis and validation methods. The approach of Test-driven Agile Simulation (TAS) combines novel model-based simulation and testing techniques in order to achieve an improved overall quality during the development process. Thus, the TAS approach enables the simulation of a modeled system and the simulated execution of test cases, such that both system and test models can mutually be validated at early design stages prior to expensive implementation and testing on real hardware. By executing system specifications in a simulation environment, the TAS approach also supports a cheap and agile technique for quantitative assessments and performance estimates to identify system bottlenecks and for system improvements at different abstraction levels. In this chapter we will present the current status of the TAS approach, a software tool realization based on the Eclipse RCP, and a detailed example from the image processing domain illustrating the methodology.