Testing Embedded Real Time Systems with TTCN-3

Großmann, Jürgen; Serbanescu, Diana; Schieferdecker, Ina: Testing Embedded Real Time Systems with TTCN-3, 2008, 2nd International Conference on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation, Denver 2009

The problems of testing software based systems that, like automobiles, steadily increase in complexity are still not solved. To cope with the requirements and complexities of today’s systems, adequate test solutions are needed, which at least feature a minimum of flexibility, reusability and abstraction. The Testing and Test Control Notation TTCN-3 is a test specification language, which was originally developed to meet the requirements of testing telecommunication systems. The language is modular, well-structured, standardized and supports testing of communicating systems. However, the correctness of a large number of embedded systems cannot be assessed by checking functional requirements only. In addition to that non-functional requirements, especially time related input-output behavior, have to be considered. The current version of TTCN-3 has only limited capabilities for testing such non-functional properties. To overcome these limitations we will extend TTCN-3 with a small set of specific language means that are dedicated to check real-time properties of embedded system. We will explain the syntax and semantics of the new constructs, compare our solution with the expressiveness of standard TTCN-3 and, as a proof of concept, provide a small example from the automotive domain that particularly motivate the use of TTCN-3 in the context of AUTOSAR.