Testing and Domain-Specific Modelling with TDL

The tutorial provides an introduction to the ETSI test description language TDL. TDL fills the gap between high-level test purpose descriptions, which are often given in a natural language, and executable, concrete test cases. While concrete test cases realize the behaviour of the tester for a given test purpose, TDL provides the user with a language to specify scenarios of interactions between tester and SUT, which detail a test purpose description sufficiently to enable partially automated translation to concrete test cases. Besides introducing the purpose of TDL, the tutorial motivates the need for domain-specific test modelling in projects and explains the TDL basic concepts of test configurations, test behaviour, test data and time using examples from ETSI and outside. Applications of TDL to common tasks in a test project will be showcased, such as test documentation, test design, test generation, test visualisation and roundtrip engineering. The discussed use cases are based on current practices at ETSI and in the ICT industry. The newly available TDL reference implementation platform from an ETSI STF project, which will be made freely available, is introduced. It is shown how these tools help produce and visualise TDL specifications from industrial projects. Further on, the tutorial introduces briefly the base technology of meta-modelling that is used to design TDL. Utilizing this knowledge it is demonstrated how users and tool-smiths can quickly build their own TDL enabled tools and integrate them with the reference implementation platform and existing tool chains. It is outlined how different tools can be integrated using established technologies in order to cover typical testing tasks such as creation of test descriptions from test purposes, generation of concrete test cases and test documentation from test descriptions. The examples and the tooling created for demonstration purposes during the tutorial will be made available online such that participants can improve their knowledge on TDL further and dig into details according to their own interests and needs.