A Message Sequence Chart-profile for Graphical Test Specification, Development and Tracing

Recently, international standard bodies approved the third evolution of the TTCN test specification language (TTCN-3) as a requirement to modernise and widen its application beyond pure OSI conformance testing. Even though TTCN-3 makes the description of complex distributed test behaviour much easier there is still a requirement from the user community to provide a visualisation means for test specification, development and tracing. Message Sequence Charts (MSC) appeared to be a particularly attractive candidate as a graphical means for visualising TTCN-3 test cases. Therefore, in addition to the pure textual core language, TTCN-3 also defines a MSC profile called the Graphical Presentation Format for TTCN (GPF). This paper describes some of the main concepts of GPF, its use and application to real test suite examples.