Quality assurance for TTCN-3 test specifications

Comprehensive testing of modern communication systems often requires large and complex test suites, which have to be maintained throughout the system life-cycle. Industrial experience, with those written using the standardised Testing and Test Control Notation (TTCN-3), has shown that this maintenance is a non-trivial task and its burden can be reduced by means of appropriate concepts and tool support. To this aim, Motorola has collaborated with the University of Göttingen to develop TRex, an open-source TTCN-3 development environment, which notably provides suitable metrics and refactorings to enable the assessment and automatic restructuring of test suites. This article presents concepts like metrics and refactoring for the quality assurance of TTCN-3 test suites and their implementation provided by the TRex tool. These means make it far easier to construct and maintain TTCN-3 tests that are concise and optimally balanced with respect to maintainability quality characteristics.