Application of embedded testing methods to service validation

Abstract

Conformance testing is a crucial phase in the life-cycle of communicating systems. However, classical testing methods are not appropriate for use in all tasks concerning the test of telecommunications services (especially regression and integration tests). This is so because Intelligent Networks, into which these services are installed, are modular architectures (composed of building blocks) evolving basically by the addition of new services/features that may share the same resources (reusability). This paper investigates how embedded conformance testing methods can be applied in the context of service validation, taking into account the different testing phases in the service life-cycle. In order to illustrate their application, the validation of telephone services (Basic Call Service, Originating Call Screening and Call Forward Unconditional) on an Intelligent Network framework is presented. It is also shown how some cases of feature interaction can be detected.

Different Approaches to Protocol and Service Testing

“…In addition to the Basic Call Services (BCSs), two other services are included: Originating Call Screening (OCS) and Call Forward Unconditional (CFU). These applications are described in [27,28,10] respectively.…”

“…It concerns active test generation, passive testing, embedded testing, test execution and their application to real protocols and services. This work is mainly a work developed by my research group at INT, by myself and my PhD students [24,9,26,27,28,33,19,25] but it is also the result of collaborations with colleagues from CNET [3,6], Bell Labs [4,10] and academic collaborations [5,36,35,14]. It concerns different aspects of testing, that we have studied in the last years.…”

Fault Detection within a Component of a System of Communicating FSMs

“…Some methods return a test suite, which satisfies appropriate test purposes [1,2]; other return a complete test suite w.r.t. an appropriate fault domain [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. Traditional test purpose approaches are based on the following idea: to traverse an appropriate set of transitions.…”

Fault Detection Power of a Widely Used Test Suite for a System of Communicating FSMs

“…Some of the approaches proposed to solve the problem for a system of communicating Finite State Machines (FSMs) are heuristic and do not guarantee a complete fault coverage [9]. Other approaches [11,12,13,17,18,19,25,26] deliver complete test suites with respect to various fault domains, i.e. sets of possible implementations of the component under test.…”