From testing to anti-product development

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The requirements for testing in large software projects drastically changed in recent years. The reasons for this mainly come from evolving development processes, demanding early stabilisations of complete software loads, early handover to subsequent steps, high software release quality, and in particular flexible adaptations to changing roadmaps. This study is an experience report from industrial testing in the field of telecommunications software and based on a speech given by the author at the Testing and Test Control Notation version 3 (TTCN-3) User Conference in Berlin 2006. It advocates to consider modern testing rather as the development of an anti-product that is to be developed in parallel to the product. This anti-product is itself a complex software system. Following this approach has a significant impact on the testing in these large software projects mentioned and leads to a number of consequences for the development of test systems and the structure of test teams. In this study, the role and virtues of TTCN-3 as programming language for anti-products as well as for defining the test system structure are investigated. Dealing with large embedded software systems that have several concurrent parts and additionally obey soft real-time requirements, similar constraints also hold for the test system. The virtues of parallel testing/software development life cycles as it becomes mandatory in following modern development processes are presented, and it is shown how TTCN-3 turned out in our experience to be a language particularly well suited for this purpose because of its advanced structured programming concepts derived from strong typing, template concepts and parametrizations of templates.