Design for testability: a step-wise approach to protocol testing
Hartmut König, Andreas Ulrich, Monika Heiner · 1997
We present an approach to support the design for testability aspect of communication protocols. It combines the ad-hoc techniques partitioning and instrumentation known from integrated circuit testing. A protocol specification is divided into modules of reasonable size. This module structure is preserved in the implementation. Extra test points are added to observe inter-module communication. The test procedure consists of several steps. In the first step, modules are tested separately by applying a powerful test method, whereas following integration tests of modules exploit additional information provided by observers. The application of less sophisticated test methods is propagated for these steps. We show that this testing approach extends testability while fault detection capability is maintained.