A formal assessment of synchronous testability for communicating systems

A testability assessment approach for multicomponent systems is proposed within the framework of formal description techniques. The approach relies on the formal definition of implementation conformance with respect to a given specification. It provides measures of user confidence and guidelines for an automatic design analysis. Both items are based on test requirements. The proposed technique for testability assessment formalizes the common-sense statement that testability of a component is degraded when this component cannot be tested in isolation. Furthermore, it gives a precise answer to the question: What are the limits of a test taking into consideration the constraints of a given environment?