Protocol conformance testing within ISO aims at increasing the probability that communication systems of different vendors are able to interwork. A first step towards establishing worldwide conformance testing services was the development of international standards providing a common framework and a test notation (TTCN). With the publication of the 5 part standard ISO 9646, which is expected in early 1992, this task has been successfully finished. In a second step, test suites have to be standardized in order to have common references for the certification of implementations. These test suites are still being developed manually and due to their immense size and the lack of appropriate tool support they may contain errors. In order to achieve the goals of conformance testing it is of utmost importance that the correctness of test suites can be assured. In this paper, we clarify the meaning of correctness of test suites and propose methods for test suite validation. The design and implementation status of a prototype tool for automatic test suite validation, based on formal protocol descriptions and FDT simulators, is described.
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