Abstract. Conformiq Qtronic1 is a commercial tool for model driven testing. It derives tests automatically from behavioral system models. These are black-box tests [1] by nature, which means that they depend on the model and the interfaces of the system under test, but not on the internal structure (e.g. source code) of the implementation.In this essay, which accompanies my invited talk, I survey the nature of Conformiq Qtronic, the main implementation challenges that we have encountered and how we have approached them.
Problem StatementConformiq Qtronic is an ongoing attempt to provide an industrially applicable solution to the following technical problem: Create an automatic method that provided an object (a model) M that describes the external behavior of an open system (begin interpreted via well-defined semantics) constructs a strategy to test real-life black-box systems (implementations) I in order to find out if they have the same external behavior as M .(Now the fact that we have created a company with the mission to solve this technical problem hints that we believe it to be a good idea to employ automatic methods of this kind in actual software development processes-which is not a priori self-evident. In this essay, however, I will not touch these commercial and methodological issues, but will concentrate on the technical problem only.)Two notes are due, and the first concerns the test harness. It is namely usually so that the model M describes a system with different interfaces and behavior than the real implementation that is being tested (iut, implementation under test). Virtually always, the model M is somehow described on a higher level of abstraction than the real implementation. As a concrete example, sip (Session Initiation Protocol) [2] is a packet-oriented protocol that is run over a transport (e.g. udp [3]) and that has an ascii encoding: every sip packet is encoded as a series of ascii characters. However, some possible model M for testing an sip implementation could define the logical flow of packets with their main contents but not describe, for instance, their actual encoding. How can this model M be used to test a real sip implementation that requires ascii encoded packets over udp? The answer is that the "abstract" tests generated automatically from 1 www.conformiq.com A.