Improving quality and interoperability of protocol implementations via conformance testing standardization

The authors show how requirements for correct and reliable implementations of interface protocols can be achieved by a rigorous, efficient, and effective procedure to standardize protocol conformance test suites and conformance testing methodology. They review accomplishments such as X.25 and integrated services digital network LAPD conformance test standards and the draft international standard language TTCN (Tree and Tabular Combined Notation) for defining international standard test suites. They also give canonical patterns for conformance test instances and show how the use of integrated tools such as the TTCN workbench developed in the Testing Open Communications Systems Project is assisting global accessibility to these standard test suites as a means of promoting global interoperability