TESTGEN+: An Environment for Protocol Test Suite Generation, Selection and Validation

Protocol testing is an important phase in the overall protocol development process. In this paper, we present and discuss TESTGEN+, an integrated environment for protocol test suite generation, selection, and validation, developed at the University of British Columbia. This environment is menu driven and unique in that it is constraint oriented, and is thus general and flexible. It is based on an intermediate extended transition system formalism and test coverage metrics and directly supports ASN .1 and Estelle. The test generation component TESTGEN deals with both the control flow and the data flow testing. Test selection, TESTSEL is based on coverage metric and is useful in reducing the size of a large test suite generated. Test generation and selection are integrated and guided by user-defined test suite generation constraints and parameter variation constraints as well as test selection parameter constraints. In addition, a test validation facility, TESTVAL, is integrated into TESTGEN + to allow for the validation of test cases with respect to a given specification. The environment will serve as a useful test-bed for experimenting with protocol test generation, selection, and validation as well as being a productive system for developing useful test suites for real-life protocols.