Abstract
Real-time software is usually used in circumstances where safety is important and the margin for errors is narrow. These kinds of systems have applicability in a broad band of domains as: automotive, avionics, air traffic control, nuclear power stations, industrial control, etc. As the name denotes, the main feature of applications is the criticality of their timeliness. Guaranteeing certain timeliness requires appropriate testing. As manual testing is burdensome and error prone, automated testing techniques are required. Although the importance of having a standard environment for automatic testing is high, the technologies in this area are not sufficiently developed. This paper reviews the standardized test description language Testing and Test Control Notation version 3 (TTCN-3) as a mean for real-time testing and proposes extensions to enable real-time testing with TTCN-3. The aim is to provide a complete testing solution for automatic functional and real-time testing, built around this already standardized testing language. The solution includes an environment for designing and running the tests written in the extended language. As a proof of concept, test examples, designed using the enhanced TTCN-3, are mapped to real-time platform implementations and the timeliness of each implementation is analyzed.
Highlights
As the name denotes, the main feature of real-time applications is the criticality of their timeliness
An automatized and standardized testing process will increase the efficiency of testing and will be more suitable for covering and testing requirements of such complex systems than traditional testing methods, which are involving a lot of manual testing and are, more prone to errors
A standardized testing language is needed for providing the possibility of describing tests in an easy way, a way that is used and understood without difficulty among different stakeholder in the industry
Summary
The main feature of real-time applications is the criticality of their timeliness. The real-time testing methodology and framework presented here is based on a standardized test language that was proven to be popular and successful in the industry, in areas as mobile and broadband telecommunications, medical system, IT systems and, since recently, in the automotive. Having the advantages of being a well modularized, test-oriented, user friendly and popular, TTCN-3 has the downside of not being developed with real-time focus in mind. It lacks some mechanism for dealing with real-time specific test situation. The focus of this paper will be on presenting these time automata defining the semantic of the enhancements This approach, using timed automata, is new and different from the way semantics of TTCN-3 was previously defined into the standard. The motivation for choosing timed automata is that they are mathematical instruments specialized in modelling timed behaviour in a formal way
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