Test Case Specification Techniques and System Testing Tools in the Automotive Industry: A Review

TL;DR

This paper reviews test case specification techniques and testing tools in the automotive industry, identifying challenges and proposing a catalog of criteria to improve system testing practices amidst increasing complexity.

Contribution

It provides a curated catalog of techniques and tools, mapped to industry challenges, to support better test specification and system testing in automotive development.

Findings

Identified nine recurring challenge areas across the testing lifecycle.

Proposed a prioritized criteria catalog for testing improvements.

Mapped techniques and tools to industry-specific testing challenges.

Abstract

The automotive domain is shifting to software-centric development to meet regulation, market pressure, and feature velocity. This shift increases embedded systems' complexity and strains testing capacity. Despite relevant standards, a coherent system-testing methodology that spans heterogeneous, legacy-constrained toolchains remains elusive, and practice often depends on individual expertise rather than a systematic strategy. We derive challenges and requirements from a systematic literature review (SLR), complemented by industry experience and practice. We map them to test case specification techniques and testing tools, evaluating their suitability for automotive testing using PRISMA. Our contribution is a curated catalog that supports technique/tool selection and can inform future testing frameworks and improvements. We synthesize nine recurring challenge areas across the life cycle, such as requirements quality and traceability, variability management, and toolchain fragmentation. We then provide a prioritized criteria catalog that recommends model-based planning, interoperable and traceable toolchains, requirements uplift, pragmatic automation and virtualization, targeted AI and formal methods, actionable metrics, and lightweight organizational practices.