Defining a Formal Semantics for Real-Time Test Specification with TTCN-31
Diana Alina Serbanescu, Ina Schieferdecker · International Journal of Software Engineering & Applications · 2013
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 "real-time" 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.