The growing need to test systems post-release has led to extending testing activities into production environments, where uncertainty and dynamic conditions pose significant challenges. Field testing approaches, especially Self-Adaptive Testing in the Field (SATF), face hurdles like managing unpredictability, minimizing system overhead, and reducing human intervention, among others. Despite its importance, SATF remains underexplored in the literature. This work introduces AdapTA (Adaptive Testing Approach), a novel SATF strategy tailored for testing Body Sensor Networks (BSNs). BSNs are networks of wearable or implantable sensors designed to monitor physiological and environmental data. AdapTA employs an ex-vivo approach, using real-world data collected from the field to simulate patient behavior in in-house experiments. Field data are used to derive Discrete-Time Markov Chain (DTMC) models, which simulate patient profiles and generate test input data for the BSN. The BSN’s outputs are compared against a proposed oracle to evaluate test outcomes. AdapTA’s adaptive logic continuously monitors the system under test and the simulated patient, triggering adaptations as needed. Results demonstrate that AdapTA achieves greater effectiveness compared to a non-adaptive version of the proposed approach across three adaptation scenarios, emphasizing the value of its adaptive logic.

Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) offer a cost-effective way to monitor patients’ health and detect potential risks. Despite the growing interest attracted by BSNs, there is a lack of testing approaches for them. Testing a Body Sensor Network (BSN) is challenging due to its evolving nature, the complexity of sensor scenarios and their fusion, the potential necessity of third-party testing for certification, and the need to prioritize critical failures given limited resources. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing three BSN testing approaches: PASTA, ValComb, and TransCov. These approaches share common characteristics, which are described through a general framework called GATE4BSN. PASTA simulates patients with sensors and models sensor trends using a Discrete Time Markov Chain (DTMC). ValComb explores various health conditions by considering all sensor risk level combinations, while TransCov ensures full coverage of DTMC transitions. We empirically evaluate these approaches, comparing them with a baseline approach in terms of failure detection. The results demonstrate that PASTA, ValComb, and TransCov uncover previously undetected failures in an open-source BSN and outperform the baseline approach. Statistical analysis reveals that PASTA is the most effective, while ValComb is 76 times faster than PASTA and nearly as effective.

Scenario-based testing for automated driving systems (ADS) must be able to simulate traffic scenarios that rely on interactions with other vehicles. Although many languages for high-level scenario modelling have been proposed, they lack the features to precisely and reliably control the required micro-simulation, while also supporting behavior reuse and test reproducibility for a wide range of interactive scenarios. To fill this gap between scenario design and execution, we propose the Simulated Driver-Vehicle (SDV) model to represent and simulate vehicles as dynamic entities with their behavior being constrained by scenario design and goals set by testers. The model combines driver and vehicle as a single entity. It is based on human-like driving and the mechanical limitations of real vehicles for realistic simulation. The model leverages behavior trees to express high-level behaviors in terms of lower-level maneuvers, affording multiple driving styles and reuse. Furthermore, optimization-based maneuver planners guide the simulated vehicles towards the desired behavior. Our extensive evaluation shows the model’s design effectiveness using NHTSA pre-crash scenarios, its motion realism in comparison to naturalistic urban traffic, and its scalability with traffic density. Finally, we show the applicability of our SDV model to test a real ADS and to identify crash scenarios, which are impractical to represent using predefined vehicle trajectories. The SDV model instances can be injected into existing simulation environments via co-simulation.

Robotic systems are becoming pervasive and adopted in increasingly many domains, such as manufacturing, healthcare, and space exploration. To this end, engineering software has emerged as a crucial discipline for building maintainable and reusable robotic systems. The field of robotics software engineering research has received increasing attention, fostering autonomy as a fundamental goal. However, robotics developers are still challenged trying to achieve this goal given that simulation is not able to deliver solutions to realistically emulate real-world phenomena. Robots also need to operate in unpredictable and uncontrollable environments, which require safe and trustworthy self-adaptation capabilities implemented in software. Typical techniques to address the challenges are runtime verification, field-based testing, and mitigation techniques that enable fail-safe solutions. However, there is no clear guidance to architect ROS-based systems to enable and facilitate runtime verification and field-based testing. This paper aims to fill in this gap by providing guidelines that can help developers and quality assurance (QA) teams when developing, verifying or testing their robots in the field. These guidelines are carefully tailored to address the challenges and requirements of testing robotics systems in real-world scenarios. We conducted (i) a literature review on studies addressing runtime verification and field-based testing for robotic systems, (ii) mined ROS-based applications repositories, and (iii) validated the applicability, clarity, and usefulness via two questionnaires with 55 answers overall. We contribute 20 guidelines: 8 for developers and 12 for QA teams formulated for researchers and practitioners in robotic software engineering. Finally, we map our guidelines to open challenges thus far in runtime verification and field-based testing for ROS-based systems and, we outline promising research directions in the field.Guidelines website and replication package:https://ros-rvft.github.io.