Submitted Abstract
Satellite telecommunication systems have become a prominent technology in our daily life. To ensure service continuity, satellite system providers have to build robust and reliable ground control systems (GCSs) to control the satellite fleet orbiting in space. A GCS is a complex system composed of several software components that work in synergy to perform the main monitoring and control functions for a satellite. Given the real-time and critical nature of satellite applications, an extensive verification and validation (V&V) process is required to ensure that the GCS behaves as intended and rigorously meets its requirements.The GCS is tested to assess its internal behavior as well as its communication with satellites and their simulators. However, testing a GCS is extremely challenging because it involves (i) integration and system testing of heterogeneous components; (ii) manual analysis of the execution logs by the engineers, to validate the behavior of the various components of a GCS. The lack of automation for both integration/system testing and log analysis makes the whole V&V process very expensive, not scalable to large systems, and often not effective in discovering faults.LISTENER aims to develop a framework that enables automated integration and system testing, by automatically generating test cases based on the information stored in the execution logs. More specifically, since logs contain actual usage data about interactions taking place between components, event sequence and parameters, the generation process will derive, to the extent possible, test cases to cover the interactions and event sequences observed in the logs.This framework will reduce the cost and increase the effectiveness of the testing process for GCSs. LISTENER will use search-based software testing solutions as core technology to automatically create test cases, which will exercise the individual components of a GCS as well as their interactions. Test case generation will be supported by log analysis techniques, which will extract from the logs only the relevant data that is useful for testing.