Functional Coverage Profiling - Cognizant demonstrates live at CES 2025 in Las Vegas how development costs can be drastically reduced with a new software module.
A new software module from Cognizant is set to enable manufacturers of complex products to cut development costs by providing full transparency of the software code used. Its heart is the Functional Coverage Profiler, which maps the used software code for any product or entire vehicle fleets to a management dashboard in real time. Visitors to the Cognizant stand at CES 2025 in Las Vegas can experience live how this module can identify both redundancies and gaps in testing.
Las Vegas/USA, January 7, 2025 - At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas from January 7-10, 2025, Cognizant (West Hall, Booth 7430) will give visitors an insight into a new, self-developed software module: The Functional Coverage Profiler is designed to enable developers to use a dashboard to track in real time which parts of their own software are currently being executed within a product or entire vehicle fleets in order to discover both redundancies and blind spots. Behind this is the term “code coverage” - an important key figure from software development that provides information on whether all parts of previously written software have been run and sufficiently tested. Previous approaches in this direction were not available in live operation on the final hardware target or the vehicle and forced developers to integrate corresponding tracking commands during code creation. The Functional Coverage Profiler from Cognizant does not need this additional effort and clearly reveals where development costs can be reduced.
Changed test strategy reduces costs
The necessity of using the Functional Coverage Profiler becomes clear when looking at the challenges in automotive software development: the number of lines of code used in software-defined vehicles (SDV) has already reached the 300 million mark. All paths that can be traversed in the code must be checked sufficiently to rule out malfunctions. With the integration of necessary cyber security requirements and approval-relevant functional safety, the complexity of the software increases by a further exponent. In practice, developers are already finding that there is a lack of complete transparency of the software tests carried out across all departmental boundaries. As a result, often the same test-cases are run multiple times at the functional level as well as on the systems level or in the final vehicle. In contrast to these redundancies often there are many untested software fragments. A change in the test strategy is desirable in order to increase coverage by shifting the test cases, but also to significantly reduce the overall development effort. Together with savings on test hardware, the experts at Cognizant anticipate a potential cost reduction of up to 30%.
Functional coverage profiling: integration into existing processes is possible without additional effort
Functional coverage profiling can be integrated into the existing development processes of product- and vehicle- manufacturers without interfering with the actual software or the code of the final product. Instead, the focus is on adapting the build process when creating the application program. Existing development methods and processes can therefore be retained. This in particular should make functional coverage profiling interesting for many manufacturers, as they are generally critical of changes to existing processes due to the already high complexity of their product architecture. After implementation in the testing process, managers have access to an intuitive dashboard that provides a comprehensive overview of all tests carried out in the company and the software components that have passed through them. A “heat map” shows functional tests, system integration tests, lab car and HIL tests on all test benches, as well as the program parts executed on all vehicles in the test fleet. Gaps in test coverage and redundancies can be identified at a glance.
Functional Coverage Profiling therefore addresses one of the greatest challenges the international automotive industry faces: The search for potential cost savings along the entire lifecycle. The uncomplicated integration into existing processes and the resulting transparency along all tests carried out make the Cognizant approach a useful tool for testers and developers to better distribute the used resources and permanently reduce development costs.