Strategic testing environment with formal description techniques

The authors describe the design of a testing environment, called FOREST (formal environment for systematic testing), for communication systems. The proposed method integrates three major strategies: (1) the use of formal description techniques (FDTs), for their formal semantics, which makes them unambiguous; (2) a stepwise approach to generate appropriate test cases for different test stages; and (3) the systematic support of the testing process, from test development to test execution. FOREST consists of four major subsystems. TENT (test sequence generation tool) is a subsystem that generates test cases from the formal specification of the behavior of a given protocol. APRICOT (ASN.1 pre-compiler, coder and test-debugger) is a subsystem that generates test data from the protocol data structures definition. TESPEC (test specification editor) is a tool producing some test specification based on a standardized formalism. The last subsystem, TEXEC (test executor), is a test execution system which consists of an upper tester and a lower tester, and a simulator of the communication medium. >