TTCN quality metrics

Testing is a major factor in the successful development of efficient and reliable telecommunication implementations. Time and resources for testing are limited for economic and competitive reasons; therefore improvement in the test specification procedure is of particular interest for the industry. The need for a unified approach in conformance testing, led to the publication of the conformance testing methodology and framework (CTMF) standard ISO/IEC 9646. The tree and tabular combined notation (TTCN), is the standard language used to specify abstract test suites (ATSs). Test Suites written in TTCN are contained in a machine processable (MP) format. It is widely accepted that the observed quality of TTCN test suites published by international committees (ETSI, ITU-T) is often regarded as poor. This is an indication of weaknesses in current quality assessment (QA) practices. In this paper an automatic quality assessment method for abstract test suites is initially defined. Then based on the metrics derived for specific TTCN notation rules, total quality designation of an ATS is proposed