Compositional Testing of Communication Systems

Today, test methods for communication protocols assume, among other things, that the protocol design is specified as a single, monolithic finite state machine (FSM). From this specification, test suites that are capable of detecting output and/or transfer faults in the protocol implementation are derived. Limited applicability ofthese methods is mainly because oftheir specific assumptions, and due to the size of the derived test suite and the resulting test effort for realistic protocols. In this work, the compositional test method (C-method), which exploits the available structure of a communication protocol, is proposed. The C-method first tests each protocol component separately for output and/or transfer faults, using one of the traditional test methods, then checks for composability, and finally tests the composite system for composition faults. To check for composability and to derive the test suite for the detection of composition faults, it is not required to construct the global state machine. Instead, all information is derived from the component state machines, which avoids a potential state explosion and lengthy test cases. Furthermore, the test suite checks for composition faults only. This substantially reduces the size of the test suite and thus the overall test effort

Compositional Testing of Communication Systems

Today, test methods for communication protocols assume, among other things, that the protocol design is specified as a single, monolithic finite state machine (FSM). From this specification, test suites that are capable of detecting output and/or transfer faults in the protocol implementation are derived. Limited applicability ofthese methods is mainly because oftheir specific assumptions, and due to the size of the derived test suite and the resulting test effort for realistic protocols. In this work, the compositional test method (C-method), which exploits the available structure of a communication protocol, is proposed. The C-method first tests each protocol component separately for output and/or transfer faults, using one of the traditional test methods, then checks for composability, and finally tests the composite system for composition faults. To check for composability and to derive the test suite for the detection of composition faults, it is not required to construct the global state machine. Instead, all information is derived from the component state machines, which avoids a potential state explosion and lengthy test cases. Furthermore, the test suite checks for composition faults only. This substantially reduces the size of the test suite and thus the overall test effort

Some Results on Cross Viewpoint Consistency Checking

The ODP multiple viewpoints model prompts the very challenging issue of cross viewpoint consistency. This paper considers definitions of consistency arising from the RM-ODP and relates these in a mathematical framework for consistency checking. We place existing FDTs, in particular LOTOS, into this framework. Then we consider the prospects for viewpoint translation. Our conclusions centre on the relationship between the different definitions of consistency and on the requirements for realistic consistency checking

Action Refinement in Conformance Testing

In model based testing test cases are derived from a model (the specification) of the system we want to test. In general the model is more abstract than the implementation. This may result in test cases that are not executable, because their actions are too abstract; the implementation does not understand them. The standard approach is to rewrite the model by hand to the required level of detail and regenerate the test cases. This is error-prone and time consuming. In this paper we present an approach to automatically obtain test cases at the required level of detail by means of action refinement. Action refinement is a way to add information to the abstract model. It relates actions from the abstract model to concrete actions of the system under test. We apply this approach to a simple case of action refinement, so-called atomic linear input-inputs refinement. In order to reason about correctness between an abstract model and a concrete imp ementation we introduce a new implementation relation. We show that this relation is equivalent with the uioco implementation relation on the refined model. Furthermore we show under which conditions the refinement of a complete abstract test suite is again complete

A UML-based domain specific modeling language for the availability management framework

The Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) is a consortium of several telecommunications and computing companies that defines standard solutions for high availability platforms. One of the most important SA Forum services is the Availability Management Framework (AMF) which is responsible for managing the availability of an application running under its control. To achieve this, AMF requires a complete configuration, which consists of several entities organized according to AMF rules and constraints. In this paper, we argue that AMF concepts form a domain for which a domain-specific modeling language can greatly facilitate the generation, analysis and the management of AMF configurations. We define such a language by extending UML through its profiling mechanism and we implement it. More important, we discuss the challenges and the lessons learned in the course of this project. \uc2\ua9 2010 IEEE

Generating Early Design Models from Requirements Analysis Artifacts using Problem Frames and SysML

The relationship between requirement specifications and design models has been widely investigated with the aim of bridging (semi) automatically the gap between the two artifacts. The work reported in this paper contributes to this research stream with an approach for generating early design models from requirement artifacts and analysis criteria. The approach is based on Problem Frames, decomposition and re-composition analysis patterns and is supported by SysML