Speakers
Geogin Varghese
(DESY, Hamburg)
Nadeem Shehzad
Description
Unit and integration tests are powerful tools to ensure software quality. Writing such tests for
realtime applications accessing hardware requires not only replacing the real hardware with a
virtual implementation in software. Also time must be controlled precisely. For a number of reasons
the time scale in the simulated environment should not be identical to real time: computations
needed for a complex plant model might just be too slow for a real time simulation, or some
long-term software behaviour should be tested in a short-running test. Communications with devices
often require a specific timing which should be subject of a unit test. These examples demand using
a virtual time scale in software tests.
We present the VirtualLab framework as part of the MTCA4U tool kit. It has been designed to help
implementing such tests by introducing the concept of virtual time and combining it with an
implementation basis for virtual devices and plant models. The framework is designed modularly so
that virtual devices and model components can be reused to test different parts of the control
system software.
Primary author
Dr
Martin Hierholzer
(DESY Hamburg)
