Cross-fertilization between Hardware Verification and Software Testing

S. Ur and A. Ziv (Israel)

Keywords

Software testing, Hardware verification, Software engineering

Abstract

For many, hardware design verification and software test ing may seem like separate disciplines. Yet, significant similarities exist between software development and hard ware design, and the successful adaptation of techniques originally developed for one field for use in the other, sug gests that these disciplines are related. One prominent ex ample is code coverage, first developed for software testing and now commonly used in hardware verification. Another example is the FSM based test generator, developed for the verification of hardware modules and now successfully em ployed for software testing. Moreover, some techniques, such as reliability estimation, were developed for hardware, changed and adopted for software, and now again show their usefulness with hardware. This paper analyzes the similarities and differences between hardware verification and software testing. It provides a short survey of method ologies and techniques that were developed for one field and later adapted for the other. We then speculate, based on experience in both fields, which hardware verification technologies can potentially impact software testing.

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