Pattern-based Smell Detection in TTCN-3 Test Suites

TTCN-3 is a specification and implementation language for software tests. Just like any ordinary software, software tests can suffer from many quality problems. Software Engineering provides means and techniques to counteract these problems and to increase the quality of software in many respects. Refactoring is such a technique which is used to enhance the internal structure of code and to increase its readability, maintainability and comprehensiveness. Code parts in need of refactoring are referred to as "code smells". Refactorings for TTCN-3 test suites have already been investigated. In this thesis the concept of code smells is applied to TTCN-3. A catalog of code smells for TTCN-3 is presented, and each smell is connected to a corresponding counter measure. In addition, a tool for automated code smell detection is introduced together with results of applying this tool on existing TTCN-3 test suites.