Timing issues in distributed testing

Abstract

The objective of conformance testing is to determine whether an implementation under test (IUT) conforms to its specification. In distributed test architecture where there are multiple remote testers, the objective can be complicated by the fact that testers may encounter controllability and observability problems during the application of a test sequence. A certain amount of work has been done in the area of generating test sequence that is free from these problems. However, few researchers investigate them from the aspect of test execution. This work studies the test execution phase when test sequences are applied to the implementation and it is pointed out that controllability and observability problems can be resolved if and only if the test system implements some timing constraints. When determining these constraints, the dynamic time information during test is taken into account, which reduces the test execution time and improves test efficiency further.