VectorCAST | Software Test Automation (2024)

VectorCAST | Software Test Automation (1)

VectorCAST

Software Test Automation for High Quality Software

The VectorCAST embedded software testing platform is a family of products that automates testing activities across the software development lifecycle. The purpose of this section is to provide a high-level view of what the VectorCAST products do, how they interwork, and how you might best use them to fully meet your own software testing needs.

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  • Advantages
  • Application Areas
  • Highlights of VectorCAST 2024
  • Product Variants
  • Downloads
  • Qualification Package
  • Tool Integrations
  • Supported RTOS
  • Product Descriptions
  • Services
  • Questions?

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Advantages

  • Focus on Embedded Systems
  • Enable Continuous and Collaborative Testing
  • Provide the most Automated Tools possible
  • Works with your existing software development tools

Application Areas

Aerospace Structural coverage certification for airborne systems and equipment. Automotive Software verification and validation for automotive functional safety. Industrial Functional safety certification for programmable electronic systems. Medical Software safety certification for medical devices and equipment. Railway Software verification and validation for railway applications.

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Highlights of VectorCAST 2024

Coded Tests

In the 2024 release of VectorCAST/C++, a significant enhancement is the introduction ofCoded Tests, designed to complement the existing VectorCAST Test Editor. This feature supports the creation of test cases directly in code, leveraging thexUnit frameworkfor streamlined setup and teardown in C++ unit testing. It also enables the efficient sharing of objects between tests, improving test organization and efficiency within the context of unit testing workflows.

Download Coded Tests Product Information (PDF)

Test Case Variants

VectorCAST 2024 introduces a flexible approach to executing subsets of unit tests tailored to specific environment configurations. Utilizing aLogics File, this feature allows for precise control over which test cases are executed in a given unit test environment. Each Test Case Variant represents a unique combination of the unit test environment and the test cases applicable to it, as determined by the environment's Logics File. This functionality enhances the specificity and efficiency of unit testing, providing a refined mechanism to manage and execute tests that are most relevant to the current testing conditions.

Try VectorCAST Webinar Recording: What's New in VectorCAST 2024?

Variants

The VectorCAST embedded software testing platform is a family of products that automates testing activities across the software development lifecycle.

VectorCAST/C++ Test C and C++ components for enterprise, safety, and high integrity systems validation. VectorCAST/Ada Test Ada software components necessary for validating safety and mission-critical embedded systems. VectorCAST/QA VectorCAST/QA integrates with your build system to track metrics like code coverage and test status.

Options

TESTinsights This collaborative tool consolidates all software test results and activities from participants. VectorCAST/Coupling Automated analysis and instrumentation for data coupling and control coupling verification. VectorCAST Test Explorer Create, edit, execute and debug VectorCAST test cases from within Visual Studio Code.

Product Installers

Please see the VectorCAST Downloads Page orDownload Center to access all the VectorCAST Product Installers.

VectorCAST Downloads Visit the Download Center

Downloads

Fact Sheets

For a full list of VectorCAST fact sheets visit the download center.

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White Papers

View all VectorCAST white papers in the download center.

View All White Papers

Application Notes

View all VectorCAST application notes in the download center.

View All Application Notes

Qualification Package

Tool Qualification and Verification packages for aerospace, railway, industrial, automotive, and medical.

VectorCAST | Software Test Automation (2)

Avionics

TheVectorCAST Tool Qualification package for DO-178B and DO-178Ccontains tool qualification documentation, test cases, and procedures that let you qualify VectorCAST tools on projects based on the DO-178B/ED-12B or DO-178C/ED-12C standard. The package contains the Tool Operational Requirements (TOR) document and Tool Qualification Document (TQD) along with other documents required by DO-330. With the package, development organizations can streamline certification of their embedded systems developed using VectorCAST.

DO-178B/C Tool Qualification

VectorCAST | Software Test Automation (3)

Industrial, Automotive, Medical and Railway

TheVectorCAST Tool Validation Package for IEC 61508, ISO 26262, EN 50128, FDA and IEC 62304provides documentation, certificates, and templates that help you use VectorCAST on projects based on the IEC 61508, ISO 26262, EN 50128, FDA and IEC 62304 standards and FDA guidelines. The package includes certificates and reports from the certification authority TÜV SÜD that are based on documented, application-specific verification workflows. The VectorCAST Tool Validation Package offers organizations the required evidence to demonstrate compliance with the applicable standards.

IEC 61508, EN 50128, IEC 62304 and ISO 26262 Certification

Tool Integrations

Software Modeling

MathWorks Simulink®

Simulinkis a block diagram environment for multi-domain simulation and Model-Based Design. It supports system-level design, simulation, automatic code generation, and continuous test and verification of embedded systems. Simulink provides a graphical editor, customizable block libraries, and solvers for modeling and simulating dynamic systems.


Ansys SCADE®

Ansys SCADE® - Ansys SCADE Suiteis a model-based development environment for reliable embedded software, which provides linkage to requirements management, model-based design, verification, qualifiable/certified code generation capabilities and interoperability with other development tools and platforms.

Requirements Management

Visure Requirements

Visure Requirements ALM integration with VectorCAST - Empower engineering teams building complex products or systems to sync testing processes without losing end-to-end traceability by integrating Visure Requirements ALM with VectorCAST. Create consistency, alignment and empower teams throughout the development and testing process by making cross-functional data available to users of both systems in real-time, resulting in a more efficient effective, and successful product outcome.


Polarion® REQUIREMENTS™

Polarion REQUIREMENTSis a unified collaborative solution encompassing both Requirements Management and Test Management in a single web-based platform. Forensic level artifact linking and fully automated history guarantee traceability, accountability, transparency and easier compliance with regulations and standards.

IBM® DOORS®

IBM® DOORSis requirements management software optimized for the needs of complex and embedded systems development. IBM® DOORS enables you to capture, trace, analyze and mange changes to requirements and helps you demonstrate compliance to regulations and standards.


DOORS Next

IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Next(DOORS Next) is a requirements management tool that helps you store, categorize, link and share product requirements with stakeholders such as reviewers, designers, testers, and developers.

IBM® Rational® RequisitePro®

IBM Rational RequisiteProis a requirements management tool. Rational RequisitePro helps project teams to manage their requirements, to write good use cases, to improve traceability, to strengthen collaboration, to reduce project rework, and to increase quality.

PTC®

The customizable traceability ofPTCIntegrity provides a single source of truth that keeps all stakeholders informed of changes to requirements throughout the development process, fostering collaboration between engineering disciplines and roles. Developers and other stakeholders can easily assess and address the impact of changes before they are implemented, even across product lines, to increase agility, improve product quality and reduce product delivery risk.

Jama Software®

Jama Softwareoffers a robust solution for requirements management and end-to-end product delivery.With Jama tools as your central hub for collaborative requirements management, your product teams can capture, discuss and manage all your requirements in one place and connect everything together with end-to-end traceability and impact analysis.

Intland Software codeBeamer

codeBeamer ALMis a collaborative requirements management & ALM tool that offers robust features throughout the entire development lifecycle. Specify, manage, and trace the coverage of requirements throughout the process of development. codeBeamer offers gapless end-to-end traceability, collaboration, code and test coverage whether you're using Waterfall, Agile, or a scaled Agile method. Easy to integrate into any tool environment, codeBeamer is a disruption-free, fast, and scalable platform of collaboration to align and streamline your development processes.

Continuous Integration

Jenkins®

Jenkinsis an award-winning application that monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs run by cron. Among those things, current Jenkins focuses on the following two jobs:

  • Building/testing software projects continuously, just like CruiseControl or DamageControl. In a nutshell, Jenkins provides an easy-to-use so-called continuous integration system, making it easier for developers to integrate changes to the project, and making it easier for users to obtain a fresh build. The automated, continuous build increases the productivity.

  • Monitoring executions of externally-run jobs, such as cron jobs and procmail jobs, even those that are run on a remote machine. For example, with cron, all you receive is regular e-mails that capture the output, and it is up to you to look at them diligently and notice when it broke. Jenkins keeps those outputs and makes it easy for you to notice when something is wrong.

Wind River® Simics®

Simicsis a full system simulator helping companies increase their productivity by transforming software development processes to be faster and more efficient. When used in combination with VectorCAST, developers can create a Massively Parallel testing infrastructure that ensures testing is completed in minutes rather than days. VectorCAST and Simics enable tests to be easily run by every developer on every source change, resulting in a seamless solution for deploying high quality hardware and software applications.

The VectorCAST integration with Simics sits on top of a Continuous Integration server, such as Jenkins, controlling the test dispatch to a pool of Simics targets. By adopting this integrated approach using Simics, teams can overcome a variety of testing challenges arising from increased test complexities or limited hardware. This provides a single point of control for testing, allowing engineers to quickly and easily test an entire device. The integrated toolchain is of particular value to engineers working with complex or safety-critical applications with long life-cycles.

Bamboo®

Delivering JIRA issues – from code to customers,Bamboodoes more than just run builds and tests. It connects issues, commits, test results, and deploys so the whole picture is available to your entire product team – from project managers, to devs and testers, and sys admins.

Static Analysis

Static Analysis Tools

Vector offersPC-lint Plus, an industry-known, trusted name in Static Analysis.

Visit pclintplus.com

VectorCAST also integrates with a number of other static analysis tools, in addition to PC-lint Plus, to perform module-based or whole-program source code analysis on C and C++ codebases and automatically identifies problems at their source, prior to compilation.

Supported RTOS

VectorCAST is designed to support any commercial-quality real-time operating system (RTOS).

The VectorCAST Runtime Support Package VectorCAST RSP, provides a full-featured integration that allows for the download, execution and result capture using the built-in networking facilities of the target RTOS.

The table below is a sample of the RTOSes supported by VectorCAST. These RTOSes are provided by a number of vendors and are available under various commercial or open source terms. Please visit the providers’ website for more information.

  • INTEGRITY®
    INTEGRITY-178B®
    µ-VelOSity™
  • FreeRTOS™
  • Hard Hat Linux™
  • ELinOS
  • NEOS™
  • MQX™
  • PikeOS
  • LynxOS™
    LynxOS-178B™
    LynxOS-SE™
  • QNX Neutrino®
  • DSP/Bios™
  • Embedded Linux
  • EUROS RTOS™
  • µC/OS™
  • RTEMS™
  • DEOS
  • SafeRTOS®
  • Windows CE™
  • ThreadX™
  • Windows® XP Embedded
  • embOS™
  • VxWorks® 5.4, 6.x
    VxWorks 653®
    VxWorks Cert®
    VxWorks7
    Simics
  • RTX

News

Events

Webinar Recordings

Product Descriptions

Documents

System Requirements

Compilers

ItemDocument
Fact Sheet

VectorCAST General (PDF)

VectorCAST/QA (PDF)

VectorCAST/C++ (PDF)

VectorCAST/ADA (PDF)

VectorCAST/Coupling (PDF)

Platforms

VectorCAST and the FlexNet Publisher distributed with VectorCAST is available for two platforms, 64-bit Windows and 64-bit Linux.

Windows 64-bit

The following Windows platforms are supported (64-bit version only):

  • Windows 11
  • Windows 10
  • Windows Server 2012 R2
  • Windows 8.1
  • Windows Server 2012
  • Windows 8
  • Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1)
  • Windows 7 SP1
  • Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2)
  • Windows Vista SP2

For the Windows 64-bit VectorCAST, your machine will need to have the Windows Universal C Runtime (CRT) installed. Universal CRT Deployment | Microsoft Docs

Note that if you are using FlexNet Publisher 11.16.4, then the Windows Universal C Runtime (CRT) is required.

Note:For Windows installs, VectorCAST itself does not require administrator privileges to install. However, the VectorCAST installer, for some versions, will attempt to install redistributable packages from Microsoft if they are missing from your installation. Microsoft may require admin privileges to perform the installation of these packages. If you are able to perform the installation with administrator privileges, then you will avoid any issue that may arise from the possible installation of the Microsoft redistributable packages.

Linux 64-bit

For Linux host platforms, the minimum system requirements are:

  • A 64-bit distribution with the GNU C Library (glibc) version 2.5 or later.
  • FlexNet Publisher requires that the LSB package for your Linux platform be installed.

Certain parts of VectorCAST---mainly those related to GUIs driven by Python---rely on the Qt5 toolkit, which has further system-wide dependencies. VectorCAST functionality relying on Qt5 includes features such as the RSP Configurator and Requirements Gateway integrations. To run these features, VectorCAST follows the minimum requirements for Qt5:

  • GNU C Library (glibc) version 2.17 or later.
  • Kernel version of 3.10.0 or later.

These dependencies are not mandatory and are only necessary if you wish to run Qt5-driven functionality.

Depending on your Linux distribution, the following packages are likely to be required:

For SUSE-based distributions (e.g., SLES or OpenSUSE):

  • libxcb-image0
  • libxcb-keysyms1
  • libxcb-randr0
  • libxcb-render0
  • libxcb-render-util0
  • libxcb-shape0
  • libxcb-shm0
  • libxcb1
  • libxcb-sync1
  • libxcb-util1
  • libxcb-xfixes0
  • libxcb-xinerama0
  • libxcb-xinput0
  • libxcb-xkb1

For RedHat-based distributions (e.g., RHEL, CentOS, Oracle Linux):

  • libxcb
  • xcb-util
  • xcb-util-image
  • xcb-util-keysyms
  • xcb-util-renderutil

For Ubuntu/Debian-based distributions:

  • libxcb1
  • libxcb-image0
  • libxcb-keysyms1
  • libxcb-randr0
  • libxcb-render0
  • libxcb-render0-util0
  • libxcb-shape0
  • libxcb-shm0
  • libxcb-sync1
  • libxcb-util1
  • libxcb-xfixes0
  • libxcb-xinerama0
  • libxcb-xinput0
  • libxcb-xkb1

Compilers, Hardware, Debuggers and Simulators

VectorCAST supports C, C++ and Ada compilers. VectorCAST is user-configurable to match your development toolchain including hardware and simulators.

Services

VectorCAST | Software Test Automation (4)

Download Center

Keep your Vector products up to date with the latest versions of software and documents.

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Knowledgbase

Explore technical articles, product documentation, and access other beneficial resources.

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Training

Get the most out of your Vector hardware and software by attending our product training courses.

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Let's talk about your use cases. I will be happy to support you in finding the right solution.


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VectorCAST Expert

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PC-lint Plus | Static Code Analysis for C and C++

PC-lint Plus is a static analysis tool that finds defects in software by analyzing the C and C++ source code.

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VectorCAST | Software Test Automation (12)

VectorCAST/QA

Code coverage metrics collected through all software testing activities including...

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VectorCAST | Software Test Automation (13)

VectorCAST/C++

Automated C/C++ unit and integration test solution to validate safety and business critical embedded systems.

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VectorCAST | Software Test Automation (2024)

FAQs

What is VectorCAST used for? ›

VectorCAST/C++ is a highly automated unit and integration test solution used by embedded developers to validate safety and business critical embedded systems. This dynamic test solution is widely used in the avionics, medical device, automotive, industrial controls, railway, and financial industries.

What is the difference between vector cast and CANoe? ›

CANoe is used to perform testing of an ECU via the ECU's external interfaces. Adding VectorCAST/QA exposes the completeness of testing, providing a detailed look on the internal structure of the embedded software. Adding VectorCAST/C++ allows testing of hard-to-reach sections of the application. CPU Interrupt Contr.

What is the VectorCAST requirement gateway? ›

The VectorCAST Requirements Gateway (RGW) connects to Requirements Databases to import software requirements, link requirements to test cases and to export test results back to the Requirements Database.

What is test harness in VectorCAST? ›

Components of the VectorCAST executable harness

The test harness is data-driven, meaning the harness reads test data during execution. This approach eliminates the need to compile and link a new executable harness for each new test.

What is the use of cast in software testing? ›

Computer-aided software testing (CAST) refers to the use of software tools that automate the process of software testing. Computer Assisted Software Testing (CAST) has become a popular alternative to manual testing. CAST tools are used to automate the process of testing software applications to save time and money.

Which tool is used for integration testing? ›

SoapUI is a popular open-source tool used for testing web services, including SOAP and REST APIs. It is also commonly used as an integration testing tool with a user-friendly graphical interface that allows users to create test cases, define test steps, and configure test data easily.

Why is vector canoe used? ›

CANoe is a development and testing software tool from Vector Informatik GmbH. The software is primarily used by automotive manufacturers and electronic control unit (ECU) suppliers for development, analysis, simulation, testing, diagnostics and start-up of ECU networks and individual ECUs.

What is a canoe tool used for? ›

Canoe is a simulation tool first of all and it is used for simulating the vehicles. In a vehicle there will be n number of ECUs and if you use canoe , all the ECUs can be simulated via nodes and the nodes are written in capl which is the so called .

How to install VectorCAST in Linux? ›

  1. VectorCAST. FlexNet Publisher. ...
  2. For a Windows Installer. For a Linux Installer. ...
  3. Overview. Install VectorCAST on Windows. ...
  4. Overview. Request a License Key. ...
  5. Install the License Key. Start the License Server. ...
  6. Overview. Install the Vector License Client on Windows. ...
  7. Overview. Install VectorCAST on Linux. ...
  8. Overview. Request a License Key.
Feb 13, 2024

How does VectorCAST work? ›

Using the data gathered from the build system and from monitoring system test activities, VectorCAST/QA identifies correlations between tests and code. As the code changes, it automatically computes the minimum set of tests required to provide complete testing of the change.

What is user code in VectorCAST? ›

The User Code tag for a particular data item can be accessed by clicking on the User Code tag button from any of the User Code dialogs or from the VectorCAST toolbar. This will bring up a listing of all User Code tags available to the VectorCAST environment.

What is probe point in VectorCAST? ›

A Probe Point can force variables to be set to unexpected values or to explicitly induce a software fault such as divide by zero, stack overflow or clock rollover. By explicitly inducing the fault, the error logic will executed, and the recovery procedure can be validated.

What are vector tools in automotive? ›

Vector is the leading manufacturer of software tools and embedded components for the development of electronic systems and their networking with many different systems from CAN to Automotive Ethernet.

How do you use probe points in VectorCAST? ›

Place a probe point in the location where you want the assert to be. Use the function vcast_probe_assert() to set the condition to be checked. Run the test case(s) the condition to be checked. Go to the execution report and check the status of the Probe Point Assertion.

What is test vector in software engineering? ›

A set of inputs for testing new hardware designs. The term mostly refers to testing new chip designs, but may refer to inputs for software testing.

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