SDL and MSC Based Test Generation for Distributed Test Architectures

Abstract

Supporting simulation, validation, code generation, and test generation are the most important reasons for using specification and description language (SDL) as system specification language, and message sequence charts (MSC) as requirement specification language, within the software life-cycle for distributed systems. This chapter presents an approach to automatic generation of test cases in concurrent tree and tabular combined notation (TTCN) format. To do this, a test component configuration and information concerning the synchronization of test components has to be provided. If the synchronization is specified by means of conditions, a corresponding exchange of coordination messages (CMs) among test components can be generated automatically. The chapter provides the corresponding algorithms and presents a small example explaining the output of the algorithms. The implementation of this approach has already been started and the results of the first experiments have been promising.