ITEA D-MINT has turned the academic discipline of model-based testing into an industrial reality to cut the cost of producing complex software-based systems. This Eureka project involving 25 companies and research labs from six different countries, of which Nokia-Siemens, Tandberg, Daimler AG and the French ETSI, was awarded the ITEA 2 symposium’s Exhibition Award last year.

In classical software testing, the software and the tests for the software are written in parallel, involving the same level of complexity on the product and test sides. But, working at higher levels of abstraction and using models rather than actual code offers the potential for reuse as the models are in more general terms.

After 33 months of development and testing in eight seperate industrial domains from street lighting to mobile communications and automotive electronic control units, the project has delivered probant and ready-to-use results which may come as a breakthrough in software development.

Several of the project’s industrial partners are already starting to use D-MINT techniques. Major industrial engineering company ABB has resorted to them for the next version of its Softstarter control products. Carmaker Daimler has followed in this path to develop unit software testing, and communication technology specialist ELIKO has already used the D-MINT approach for a street-lighting control card which is now widely employed in Estonia.