Structured Testing of Worst-Case Execution Time Analysis Methods

Knowing the Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) of a program is necessary when designing and verifying real-time systems. When WCET analysis tools are used to estimate the WCET, the tool is a critical part of the system design and must be correct. In this paper we present a methodology for systematically testing WCET analysis tools. The methodology is based on a decomposition of WCET analysis into a set of components that should be tested and validated in isolation. Our testing methodology does not require that we have a perfect model of the hardware, and the validation of the hardware model is considered as a separate problem. We illustrate the usage of our testing methodology for the pipeline analysis and calculation phase of our WCET analysis method.