Quality Assurance of TTCN-3 Test Suites

The comprehensive test of modern software systems leads to large and complex test suites which have to be maintained throughout the system life-cycle. Experience with test suites written in the standardised Testing and Test Control Notation version 3 (TTCN-3) has shown that the development and maintenance of test suites is a non-trivial task which requires strict quality assurance. To address these issues, this talk presents appropriate means: refactoring, metrics, and "smell" detection for TTCN-3. Refactoring restructures a test suite systematically without changing its behaviour. Metrics are applicable to calculate numbers which can be used to assess the overall quality of test suites, but also to identify locations where a refactoring is worthwhile. In some cases, simple metrics are not sufficient for the latter task, but a pattern-based detection of inappropriate usage of TTCN-3 (so called "smells") is required. For the automation of these tasks, the TRex open-source tool has been developed as a plug-in for the popular Eclipse platform. TRex has successfully been applied to huge TTCN-3 test suites from industry and standardisation.