Quality assurance for TTCN‐3 test specifications

Abstract

Comprehensive testing of modern communication systems often requires large and complex test suites, which have to be maintained throughout the system life cycle. Industrial experience, with those written using the standardized Testing and Test Control Notation (TTCN‐3), has shown that this maintenance is a non‐trivial task and its burden can be reduced by means of appropriate concepts and tool support. To this aim, Motorola has collaborated with the University of Göttingen to develop TRex, an open‐source TTCN‐3 development environment, which notably provides suitable metrics and refactorings to enable the assessment and automatic restructuring of test suites. This article presents concepts like metrics and refactoring for the quality assurance of TTCN‐3 test suites and their implementation provided by the TRex tool. These means make it far easier to construct and maintain TTCN‐3 tests that are concise and optimally balanced with respect to maintainability quality characteristics. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Automated Refactoring Suggestions Using the Results of Code Analysis Tools

“…Neukirchen et al [16] have developed the quality assurance tool TRex for the test language TTCN-3. TRex uses software metrics and code smell detection to automatically suggest and apply one of the implemented refactorings.…”

Towards an Integrated Quality Assessment and Improvement Approach for UML Models

“…Authors such as [35] have realized this as well, but neither do they present a complete quality engineering approach for UML models including assessment and improvement that can be applied in every iteration of a development process, nor were there any widely spread model transformation languages available that could be applied for such uses. With our experience in the quality assurance of TTCN-3 [2,51], we aim to provide an integrated quality engineering approach for UML ( Figure 5) that consists of two main parts: quality assessment and quality improvement. For the assessment, a quality model is used and metrics quantify quality characteristics of this model.…”

“…Therefore, continuous tool-supported quality assurance and quality improvement measures, throughout the whole development process, are required. Based on our experience [1,2] with the quality engineering of large test specifications written in the standardized Testing and Test Control Notation (TTCN-3), we started to investigate the possibility of using similar techniques for the quality engineering of UML models. Our quality engineering approach for TTCN-3 specifications is based on: -a quality model for test specifications that defines the main quality characteristics of a test specification, -test metrics to assess the quality characteristics, -smell detection for identifying problematic locations in the test code using pattern-based analysis and metric thresholds, and -refactoring for the improvement of those problematic locations.…”

Analyzing Response Inconsistencies in Test Suites

“…For the quality assessment, a quality model is given and metrics are used to quantify quality characteristics of the test specification. The quality improvement is based on refactoring and smell detection for issue discovery [2,3]. We prototyped this approach with our TTCN-3 Refactoring and Metrics Tool (TRex) [4] for the Testing and Test Control Notation (TTCN-3) [5].…”