Csopaki, Gyula

Viet, Dung Le

Wu-Hen-Chang, Antal

Wu-Hen-Chang Antal

Viet Dung Le

Csopaki Gyula

University of Szeged

High-level Restructuring of TTCN-3 Test SuitesAntal Wu-Hen-Chang, Dung Le Viet, and Gyula CsopakiTelecommunication software provides the foundation of the communication infrastructure.These systems must be reliable, efficient and compatible with systems from different vendors.Consequently, their development must be accompanied by quality assurance activities, thustesting plays a vital role during the development process of each telecommunication system.The purpose of testing is to find all errors and shortcomings of the system. This is a veryresource-demanding and time-consuming task, because it requires the manual effort of manywell-trained developers, therefore its support is an important challenge.TTCN-3 (Testing and Test Control Notation 3) [1] is the new industry-standard test speci-fication language that was developed and standardized by the European TelecommunicationStandards Institute (ETSI). It is a very powerful language that has been tried out on differentapplication areas of testing. It can be applied for all kinds of black-box testing for reactive anddistributed systems and it is suitable to test virtually any system including telecommunicationand mobile systems, Internet and CORBA based protocols.The general testing process with TTCN-3 includes the following main steps: The developedtest suite is compiled and extended with an adaptor that provides the connection between thetested system and the executable test suite. Then the executable test suite is executed againstthe system under test. Finally, the results are evaluated.TTCN-3 has a special language element – the template – that provides sophisticated meansfor describing test data. In order to test complicated systems, the TTCN-3 templates can becreated either in a manual or in an automatic way, but in neither case is the result optimal, sincedevelopers cannot cope with the enormous number of huge data structures, and automaticmethods focus primarily on the generation problem. According to our empirical experiencestest data definition occupies at least 60-70 percent of a complete test specification and they arehighly redundant. Consequently, these modules are unnecessarily large that leads to severalproblems. In case of very large TTCN-3 modules the compilation time can be surprisingly long,which sets back the development process. It is not uncommon, that the compilation of thetest specification takes more than an hour on an average computer and complicated test suitesconsist of several different modules. Besides, executable test suites derived from large moduleshave performance drawbacks, that makes it harder to develop performance or scalability testsuites, where performance is a critical issue. Furthermore, we must take into account, that thedevelopment process of a test suite is cyclic, therefore these problems appear repeatedly.By eliminating the redundant and unused data structures, the quality of the generated im-plementation code can be significantly improved. In our paper, we introduce a re-engineeringmethod that can be applied without human intervention to test data templates defined inTTCN-3. The approach analyzes and restructures [2, 3] an already existing TTCN-3 templatespecification, so that it becomes more compact, redundancy-free and the compilation time isreduced. Naturally, the alterations retain semantical correctness, only syntactical changes areintroduced.Beside the static test data restructuring, it is worth analysing the TTCN-3 description of thedynamic behavior. The test specifications often contain repeated test steps, but because of theircomplex nature, they can’t be detected easily. We examine the possibility of applying dynamicbehavior restructurings to TTCN-3, that would extract and reuse frequently appearing teststeps.References[1] ETSI ES 201 873-1 V2.2.1 (2002-08). Methods for Testing and Specification (MTS); The Test-ing and Test Control Notation Version 3; Part1: TTCN-3 Core Language.104[2] E.J. Chikofsky and J.H. Cross. Reverse Engineering and Design Recovery: A Taxonomy,IEEE Software, Vol 7(1):13-17, 1990.[3] T. Mens and T. Tourwe. Survey of Software Refactoring, IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering,Vol. 30(2):126-139, 2004.105

High-level restructuring of TTCN-3 test suites : [abstract]

http://acta.bibl.u-szeged.hu/59894/1/cscs_2006_104-105.pdf

High-level restructuring of TTCN-3 test suites

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