Test Automation - Automatic Test Generation Technology and Its Applications

Test development has been known as a tedious and time-consuming process. For complex designs, the process can sometime stretch over several months and become a bottleneck for product time-to-market. In the past two decades, various test development automation tools have been introduced and gradually accepted by designers and test engineers to automate dozens of tasks that are essential for developing adequate tests. The test development automation tools can generally be classified into four categories: design-for-testability (DFT) tools, test-pattern-generation tools, pattern-grading tools and test program development and debugging tools.