Design for Testability of Communication Protocols Based on SDL Specification

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the problem of augmenting a partially specified extended finite-state machine, extracted from a Specification Description Language (SDL) specification, to have shorter tests. Conformance testing is used to verify whether an implementation under test exhibits a permissible behavior. Test cases derived from a reference specification are applied to an implementation under test to compare its behavior with the reference one. Length of test cases, facility of test generation, and analysis of results of test application are important factors that affect the cost of testing. Various formal description techniques (FDTs)—such as SDL, LOTOS or ESTELLE—are used for communication protocols. Most of the FDTs possess some practical tools for automatic verification and simulation of a protocol to detect and correct some classes of faults before implementing the protocol. Some unspecified transitions—such as those that can be interpreted as “don't care” transitions—to improve the testability of protocol's implementations are used in the chapter.