Automating Software Testing with VectorCAST
The VectorCAST embedded software testing platform is a family of products that automates testing activities across the software development lifecycle. The purpose of this section is to provide a high-level view of what the VectorCAST products do, how they interwork, and how you might best use them to fully meet your own software testing needs.
Advantages
- Focus on Embedded Systems
- Enable Continuous and Collaborative Testing
- Provide the most Automated Tools possible
- Works with your existing software development tools
Application Areas
Aerospace
Structural coverage certification for airborne systems and equipment.
Automotive
Software verification and validation for automotive functional safety.
Industrial
Functional safety certification for programmable electronic systems.
Medical
Software safety certification for medical devices and equipment.
Railway
Software verification and validation for railway applications.
Highlights of VectorCAST 2025
Enhanced Code Coverage Analysis – Source File Perspective (SFP)
VectorCAST 2025 introduces improved code coverage analysis with a Source File Perspective (SFP), enabling a unified view of code coverage across all source code variants. Instead of analyzing coverage separately for each variant, you can now see all coverage metrics in one place, making it easier to assess overall test completeness and identify gaps efficiently.
Optimized Parallel Execution for Faster CI Workflows
Large test campaigns often include thousands of test environments, making execution time a bottleneck. With VectorCAST 2025, parallel execution significantly reduces test cycle time, allowing tests to run more frequently within CI/CD pipelines. Faster execution means quicker detection and resolution of quality issues, accelerating development while maintaining high software reliability.
Variants
The VectorCAST embedded software testing platform is a family of products that automates testing activities across the software development lifecycle.
VectorCAST/C++
Test C and C++ components for enterprise, safety, and high integrity systems validation.
VectorCAST/Ada
Test Ada software components necessary for validating safety and mission-critical embedded systems.
VectorCAST/QA
VectorCAST/QA integrates with your build system to track metrics like code coverage and test status.
Options
VectorCAST/Coupling
Automated analysis and instrumentation for data coupling and control coupling verification.
VectorCAST Test Explorer
Create, edit, execute and debug VectorCAST test cases from within Visual Studio Code.
VectorCAST Coded Tests
Everything you need to write in-code unit tests and meet your safety-critical requirements.
Product Installers
Please see the VectorCAST Downloads Page or Download Center to access all the VectorCAST Product Installers.
Qualification Package
Tool Qualification and Verification packages for aerospace, railway, industrial, automotive, and medical.
Avionics
The VectorCAST Tool Qualification package for DO-178B and DO-178C contains tool qualification documentation, test cases, and procedures that let you qualify VectorCAST tools on projects based on the DO-178B/ED-12B or DO-178C/ED-12C standard. The package contains the Tool Operational Requirements (TOR) document and Tool Qualification Document (TQD) along with other documents required by DO-330. With the package, development organizations can streamline certification of their embedded systems developed using VectorCAST.
Industrial, Automotive, Medical and Railway
The VectorCAST Tool Validation Package for IEC 61508, ISO 26262, EN 50128, FDA and IEC 62304 provides documentation, certificates, and templates that help you use VectorCAST on projects based on the IEC 61508, ISO 26262, EN 50128, FDA and IEC 62304 standards and FDA guidelines. The package includes certificates and reports from the certification authority TÜV SÜD that are based on documented, application-specific verification workflows. The VectorCAST Tool Validation Package offers organizations the required evidence to demonstrate compliance with the applicable standards.
Tool Integrations
Software Modeling
MathWorks Simulink®
Simulink is a block diagram environment for multi-domain simulation and Model-Based Design. It supports system-level design, simulation, automatic code generation, and continuous test and verification of embedded systems. Simulink provides a graphical editor, customizable block libraries, and solvers for modeling and simulating dynamic systems.
Ansys SCADE®
Ansys SCADE® - Ansys SCADE Suite is a model-based development environment for reliable embedded software, which provides linkage to requirements management, model-based design, verification, qualifiable/certified code generation capabilities and interoperability with other development tools and platforms.
Requirements Management
Visure Requirements
Visure Requirements ALM integration with VectorCAST - Empower engineering teams building complex products or systems to sync testing processes without losing end-to-end traceability by integrating Visure Requirements ALM with VectorCAST. Create consistency, alignment and empower teams throughout the development and testing process by making cross-functional data available to users of both systems in real-time, resulting in a more efficient effective, and successful product outcome.
Polarion® REQUIREMENTS™
Polarion REQUIREMENTS is a unified collaborative solution encompassing both Requirements Management and Test Management in a single web-based platform. Forensic level artifact linking and fully automated history guarantee traceability, accountability, transparency and easier compliance with regulations and standards.
IBM® DOORS®
IBM® DOORS is requirements management software optimized for the needs of complex and embedded systems development. IBM® DOORS enables you to capture, trace, analyze and mange changes to requirements and helps you demonstrate compliance to regulations and standards.
DOORS Next
IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Next (DOORS Next) is a requirements management tool that helps you store, categorize, link and share product requirements with stakeholders such as reviewers, designers, testers, and developers.
IBM® Rational® RequisitePro®
IBM Rational RequisitePro is a requirements management tool. Rational RequisitePro helps project teams to manage their requirements, to write good use cases, to improve traceability, to strengthen collaboration, to reduce project rework, and to increase quality.
PTC®
The customizable traceability of PTC Integrity provides a single source of truth that keeps all stakeholders informed of changes to requirements throughout the development process, fostering collaboration between engineering disciplines and roles. Developers and other stakeholders can easily assess and address the impact of changes before they are implemented, even across product lines, to increase agility, improve product quality and reduce product delivery risk.
Jama Software®
Jama Software offers a robust solution for requirements management and end-to-end product delivery. With Jama tools as your central hub for collaborative requirements management, your product teams can capture, discuss and manage all your requirements in one place and connect everything together with end-to-end traceability and impact analysis.
PTC codeBeamer
codeBeamer ALM is a collaborative requirements management & ALM tool that offers robust features throughout the entire development lifecycle. Specify, manage, and trace the coverage of requirements throughout the process of development. codeBeamer offers gapless end-to-end traceability, collaboration, code and test coverage whether you're using Waterfall, Agile, or a scaled Agile method. Easy to integrate into any tool environment, codeBeamer is a disruption-free, fast, and scalable platform of collaboration to align and streamline your development processes.
Continuous Integration
Jenkins®
Jenkins is an award-winning application that monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs run by cron. Among those things, current Jenkins focuses on the following two jobs:
- Building/testing software projects continuously, just like CruiseControl or DamageControl. In a nutshell, Jenkins provides an easy-to-use so-called continuous integration system, making it easier for developers to integrate changes to the project, and making it easier for users to obtain a fresh build. The automated, continuous build increases the productivity.
- Monitoring executions of externally-run jobs, such as cron jobs and procmail jobs, even those that are run on a remote machine. For example, with cron, all you receive is regular e-mails that capture the output, and it is up to you to look at them diligently and notice when it broke. Jenkins keeps those outputs and makes it easy for you to notice when something is wrong.
Wind River® Simics®
Simics is a full system simulator helping companies increase their productivity by transforming software development processes to be faster and more efficient. When used in combination with VectorCAST, developers can create a Massively Parallel testing infrastructure that ensures testing is completed in minutes rather than days. VectorCAST and Simics enable tests to be easily run by every developer on every source change, resulting in a seamless solution for deploying high quality hardware and software applications.
The VectorCAST integration with Simics sits on top of a Continuous Integration server, such as Jenkins, controlling the test dispatch to a pool of Simics targets. By adopting this integrated approach using Simics, teams can overcome a variety of testing challenges arising from increased test complexities or limited hardware. This provides a single point of control for testing, allowing engineers to quickly and easily test an entire device. The integrated toolchain is of particular value to engineers working with complex or safety-critical applications with long life-cycles.
Bamboo®
Delivering JIRA issues – from code to customers, Bamboo does more than just run builds and tests. It connects issues, commits, test results, and deploys so the whole picture is available to your entire product team – from project managers, to devs and testers, and sys admins.
Supported RTOS
VectorCAST is designed to support any commercial-quality real-time operating system (RTOS).
The VectorCAST Runtime Support Package VectorCAST RSP, provides a full-featured integration that allows for the download, execution and result capture using the built-in networking facilities of the target RTOS.
The table below is a sample of the RTOSes supported by VectorCAST. These RTOSes are provided by a number of vendors and are available under various commercial or open source terms. Please visit the providers’ website for more information.
- INTEGRITY®
INTEGRITY-178B®
µ-VelOSity™ - FreeRTOS™
- Hard Hat Linux™
- ELinOS
- NEOS™
- MQX™
- PikeOS
- LynxOS™
LynxOS-178B™
LynxOS-SE™ - QNX Neutrino®
- DSP/Bios™
- Embedded Linux
- EUROS RTOS™
- µC/OS™
- RTEMS™
- DEOS
- SafeRTOS®
- Windows CE™
- ThreadX™
- Windows® XP Embedded
- embOS™
- VxWorks® 5.4, 6.x
VxWorks 653®
VxWorks Cert®
VxWorks7
Simics - RTX
Product Descriptions
| Item | Document |
| Fact Sheet | |
| Case Studies | Accelerating DO-178C Certification with VectorCAST (PDF) VectorCAST Tests Vision Unit of hinotoriTM Surgical Robot System (PDF) Certification of Safety-Critical Software for New Medical Monitoring System (PDF) Safety-Critical Software Certification for Guided Transport System (Website) |
Platforms
VectorCAST 2025 is available for two platforms, 64-bit Windows and 64-bit Linux.
Windows 64-bit
The following Windows platforms are supported (64-bit versions only):
The system requirement for VectorCAST version 2025 on Windows is Windows 10 or later, or Windows Server 2016 or later.
The version requirements for FlexNet Publisher are listed in "Upgrading VectorCAST" on page 36. Note that if you are using FlexNet Publisher 11.16.4 or later, then the Windows Universal C Runtime (CRT) is required.
Linux 64-bit
For Linux host platforms, the minimum system requirements are Linux glibc 2.17 or later.
- libxcb-image0
- libxcb-keysyms1
- libxcb-randr0
- libxcb-render0
- libxcb-render-util0
- libxcb-shape0
- libxcb-shm0
- libxcb1
- libxcb-sync1
- libxcb-util1
- libxcb-xfixes0
- libxcb-xinerama0
- libxcb-xinput0
- libxcb-xkb1
For RedHat-based distributions (e.g., RHEL, CentOS, Oracle Linux):
- libxcb
- xcb-util
- xcb-util-image
- xcb-util-keysyms
- xcb-util-renderutil
For Ubuntu/Debian-based distributions:
- libxcb1
- libxcb-image0
- libxcb-keysyms1
- libxcb-randr0
- libxcb-render0
- libxcb-render0-util0
- libxcb-shape0
- libxcb-shm0
- libxcb-sync1
- libxcb-util1
- libxcb-xfixes0
- libxcb-xinerama0
- libxcb-xinput0
- libxcb-xkb1
Compilers, Hardware, Debuggers and Simulators
VectorCAST supports C, C++ and Ada compilers. VectorCAST is user-configurable to match your development toolchain including hardware and simulators.
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Questions?
Let's talk about your use cases. I will be happy to support you in finding the right solution.
Jeffrey Fortin
VectorCAST Expert