Testing Embedded Real Time Systems with TTCN-3

The problems of testing software based systems that, like automobiles, steadily increase in complexity are still not solved. To cope with the requirements and complexities of today´s systems, adequate test solutions are needed, which at least feature a minimum of flexibility, reusability and abstraction. The Testing and Test Control Notation TTCN-3 is a test specification language, which was originally developed to meet the requirements of testing telecommunication systems. The language is modular, well-structured, standardized and supports testing of communicating systems. However, the correctness of a large number of embedded systems can not be assessed by checking functional requirements only. In addition to that non-functional requirements, especially time related input-output behavior, have to be considered. The current version of TTCN-3 has only limited capabilities for testing such non-functional properties. To overcome these limitations we will extend TTCN-3 with a small set of specific language means that are dedicated to check real-time properties of embedded system. We will explain the syntax and semantics of the new constructs, compare our solution with the expressiveness of standard TTCN-3 and, as a proof of concept, provide a small example from the automotive domain that particularly motivate the use of TTCN-3 in the context of AUTOSAR.