Page - 70 - in The Future of Software Quality Assurance

70 T.Linz • Reliability: Reliability is the ability of the system to maintain its once achieved quality levelundercertainconditionsovera fixedperiodof time.Test topicscan be: Can the robot repeat a behavior several times in a row without errors, or do joints misalign in continuous operation? Can the robot tolerate/compensate (hardware)errors toa certaindegree? • Security: To check how resistant the system is against unwanted access or criminal attack on data of the system or its users or on the entire system itself. Questionscanbe: – Does the operator need a password to switch on? How secure is this? With autonomous robots such as “Mobipick,” the highest security risk arises from the control mode. The easier it is to manipulate the commands given to the system, the easier it is to (maliciously) take over or shut down the system. Is therobotoperatedviaWLAN/radio?Is thedataexchangewiththesystemand within the system encrypted?Can thirdparties read along,possibly latch into thedatatrafficandmanipulateoreventakeoverthesystem?Theunauthorized takeoverofanautonomoussystemcanhaveseriousconsequences, inextreme cases its use as a weapon. Therefore, security features are always safety- relevant features! – In order to be able to clarify liability issues in the event of an accident, legislators already require autonomous vehicles to record usage data during operation. In Germany these must be kept available for 6 months (see [16]). Similarrequirementsareexpectedforotherautonomoussystems.TheGDPR- compliant data security of the system, but also associated (cloud based) accountingormanagementsystems, is thereforeanother important issue. • Maintainability: A good maintainability is given if software and hardware are modular and the respective components are reusable and easily changeable. Questions in this context are: how are dependencies between software and hardwaremanaged?Does thesoftware recognizewhichhardware itneeds?How do the update mechanisms work? Is it defined which regression tests are to be performedafter changes? • Portability: At first glance, the software of robots can be transferred to other robot types to a very limited extent because it is strongly adapted to the specific conditionsof thehardwareplatformand the respectivefirmware. – Individual software components (e.g., for navigation), on the other hand, are generic or based on libraries. It must be tested whether the libraries used in theconcreterobot(e.g.,“Mobipick”)actuallyworkfaultlesslyonthisspecific platform. – Theautonomoussystemitselfcanalsobe“ported”ormodifiedforuseinother (thanoriginally intended)environments.Forexample,by installingadditional sensorsandassociatedevaluationsoftware. The examples show how complex and time-consuming the testing of an autonomoussystem canbe.An importantfinding is: