Systematic analysis of practical issues in test automation for communication based systems

This paper is about issues experienced along testing large-scale industrial products, with safety and security critical relevance. The challenges in testing - several thousand requirements for several product variants and various configurations - were addressed by test execution automation. However, since principal testing concepts as well as architectural concepts were ignored or poorly implemented, the test automation activities faced various difficulties within the considered projects. The current paper presents these issues in an abstracted manner and discusses possible solutions.