A framework for the specification of test cases for real-time distributed systems

The OSI conformance testing methodology and framework (CTMF) is a well established standard which defines and regulates the conformance testing procedure for protocol implementations. Conformance testing is meant to be functional black-box testing. Besides concepts and terminology, the CTMF standardizes testing architectures and the Tree and Tabular Combined Notation (TTCN) test specification language. As more and more distributed systems such as multimedia, safety-critical and real-time systems rely on the timely availability of information, testing of real-time requirements becomes a serious issue, too. Unfortunately, testing real-time and other non-functional requirements (performance and reliability) are outside the scope of CTMF. In this paper we present an extension of CTMF which allows us to specify rest cases for testing real-time requirements. The extension includes a generic testing architecture and a notation for test specification, which is called real-time TTCN. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.