Validating the Behavioral Equivalence of TTCN-3 Test Cases

Refactoring has been proven as useful means to improve the quality of source code. However, when improperly applied, it may introduce undesired changes to the observable behavior of the software. In this paper, an equivalence checking approach is presented to validate the behavior preservation after the application of refactoring in the domain of test cases specified using the Testing and Test Control Notation Version 3 (TTCN-3). The approach is based on bisimulation and incrementally checks the observable behavior of two test cases at runtime for equivalence. The approach is implemented prototypically and sample experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach.