Refactoring and Metrics for TTCN-3 Test Suites

Experience with the development and maintenance of test suites has shown that the Testing and Test Control Notation (TTCN-3) provides very good concepts for adequate test specification. However, experience has also demonstrated that during either the migration of legacy test suites to TTCN-3, or the development of large TTCN-3 test specifications, users have found it is difficult to construct TTCN-3 tests that are concise with respect to readability, usability, and maintainability. To address these issues, this paper investigates refactoring and metrics for TTCN-3. Refactoring restructures a test suite systematically without changing its behaviour. Complementary metrics are used to assess the quality of TTCN-3 test suites. For automation, a tool called TRex has been developed that supports refactoring and metrics for TTCN-3.

[1]  K. Beck,et al.  Extreme Programming Explained , 2002 .

[2]  K. Barraclough.  Eclipse , 2006, BMJ : British Medical Journal.

[3]  Dieter Hogrefe,et al.  An introduction to the testing and test control notation (TTCN-3) , 2003, Comput. Networks.

[4]  William F. Opdyke,et al.  Refactoring object-oriented frameworks , 1992 .

[5]  Ina Schieferdecker,et al.  A Meta-model for TTCN-3 , 2004, FORTE Workshops.

[6]  Cemal Yilmaz,et al.  Software Metrics , 2008, Wiley Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Engineering.

[7]  Manuel Núñez,et al.  Applying Formal Methods: Testing, Performance, and M/E-Commerce , 2004, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[8]  Brian Nielsen,et al.  Formal Approaches to Software Testing, 4th International Workshop, FATES 2004, Linz, Austria, September 21, 2004, Revised Selected Papers , 2005, FATES.

[9]  Roland Gecse,et al.  High-Level Restructuring of TTCN-3 Test Data , 2004, FATES.

[10]  Frank Weil,et al.  Model-Driven engineering in a large industrial context — motorola case study , 2005, MoDELS'05.

[11]  Tom Mens,et al.  A survey of software refactoring , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[12]  Jens Grabowski,et al.  TRex - The Refactoring and Metrics Tool for TTCN-3 Test Specifications , 2006, Testing: Academic & Industrial Conference - Practice And Research Techniques (TAIC PART'06).

[13]  Brian Henderson-Sellers,et al.  Object-Oriented Metrics , 1993, TOOLS.

[14]  Robin Milner,et al.  A Calculus of Communicating Systems , 1980, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[15]  Thomas Deiß.  Refactoring and converting a TTCN-2 test suite , 2008, International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer.

[16]  Michael Schmitt,et al.  Automatic test generation based on formal specifications: practical procedures for efficient state space exploration and improved representation of test cases , 2003 .

[17]  Maurice H. Halstead,et al.  Elements of software science (Operating and programming systems series) , 1977 .

[18]  David Lorge Parnas,et al.  Software aging , 1994, Proceedings of 16th International Conference on Software Engineering.

[19]  Kent L. Beck,et al.  Extreme programming explained - embrace change , 1990 .

[20]  Dolores R. Wallace,et al.  Structured Testing: A Testing Methodology Using the Cyclomatic Complexity Metric , 1996 .

[21]  Arie van Deursen,et al.  Refactoring test code , 2001 .

[22]  Maurice H. Halstead,et al.  Elements of software science , 1977 .

[23]  Chris F. Kemerer,et al.  A Metrics Suite for Object Oriented Design , 2015, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[24]  Jens Grabowski,et al.  TRex – An Open-Source Tool for Quality Assurance of TTCN-3 Test Suites , 2006 .

[25]  Victor R. Basili,et al.  A Methodology for Collecting Valid Software Engineering Data , 1984, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.