Development and quality-assurance of software-intensive systems have become key factors of successful product engineering in many industrial sectors. The introduction of new restrictive technical standards, e.g. IEC 61508, the increasing time-to-market pressure, and growing system complexities demand new powerful software quality assurance methods and tools.
Successful system development relies on the use of product and process models for organizational purposes, requirements analysis, design and testing. The systematic application of software testing, i.e. execution of the software with sample inputs to reveal faults or to prove certain quality properties, on the basis of models significantly reduces overall expenses in quality assurance before and after product release.

Automation of software development and software testing on the basis of executable models is currently an encouraging industrial trend, which has a significant impact on processes, methods and tools for software engineering. In combination with code generation, early prototyping, or simulation these model based approaches offer a high degree of automation and therefore significantly reduce the probability of human errors during the complete software lifecycle. Nevertheless, the automation of model based testing demands changes in the requirements analysis, development and testing process, which to this day have neither been successfully applied nor completely understood. Even though advanced model-based testing technologies are available from research, few have been deployed in practice due to a significant lack of powerful commercial or open-source tools.

D-MINT, a consortium of 27 partners from industry and research based in 5 European countries, aims to develop, enhance, and deploy high performance methods and tools for quality assurance of large and distributed software-intensive systems. Each D-MINT partner provides domain specific challenges, ideas, and concepts to the project, which are integrated into a comprehensive approach on automated software engineering. As a key concept every development within D-MINT is driven on the basis of case studies, which also serve for empirical and functional validation of results. D-MINT will provide partners and European Industry with leading edge technology that is capable to produce high quality software at reduced expenditure in terms of time and money.