Behavior Specification for Testing Embedded Systems

A behavior specification is a valuable engineering artifact for the design, review, and testing of embedded software. It is a black-box model defining all interactions between system and environment and the conditional state-based causal relationships among them. Based on work by IEEE working group P1175, Dwayne Knirk describes a new reference model for specifying the behavior of computing systems. An embedded software control application is used to illustrate the application of this model. Dwayne provides an overview of the application and shows specification examples from the requirements document. He focuses on how the specification was initially developed, analyzed for completeness and consistency, used for generating test cases, and valued by the entire development and test team throughout the project.