Abstract
In recent years early life failures have caused several product recalls in semiconductor and automotive industries associated with a loss of billions of dollars. They can be traced back to various root-causes. In embedded or cyber-physical systems, the interaction with the environment and the behavior of the hardware/software interface are hard to predict, which may lead to unforeseen failures. In addition to that, defects that have escaped manufacturing test or “weak” devices that cannot stand operational stress may for example cause unexpected hardware problems in the early life of a system. The special session focuses on the first aspect. The first contribution discusses how the interaction with the environment in cyber-physical systems can be appropriately modeled and tested. The second presentation then deals with a cross-layer approach identifying problems at the hardware/software interface which cannot be compensated by the application and must therefore be targeted by specific tests.