Modern defence platforms increasingly gain capability through frequent software updates rather than major hardware upgrades. That shift brings speed, flexibility, and lower cost, but it also exposes a growing mismatch: capability is delivered continuously, while software assurance is still often treated as a one-time activity before deployment.
Traditional verification remains essential. Unit testing, static analysis, integration testing, and qualification provide the foundation for safe and reliable embedded systems. But they cannot fully reveal how software behaves under real operational conditions: timing pressure, task contention, hardware interactions, environmental factors, and complex integration scenarios. Some faults only emerge after deployment, triggered by rare combinations of runtime events that are difficult or impossible to reproduce in the laboratory.
