Chapter 13
TTCN-3 Test Systems in Practice
The development of a complete test system involves more than just writing the Testing and Test Control Notation Version 3 (TTCN-3) code that describes the behaviour. In this chapter, we look in more detail at the overall test system, which has already been presented briefly in our very first TTCN-3 example. We will first review the overall structure of a TTCN-3 test system and then present its most important entities in more detail. We will introduce the roles of these entities, how they work internally, and how they interact. These concepts will be explained using an elementary TTCN-3 test case similar to the test cases that we have already studied in Chapter 2. In addition, we will discuss the interfaces via which the interactions between test system entities take place. These are the standardised TTCN-3 Runtime Interface (TRI) and TTCN-3 Control Interface (TCI).
Although this chapter mainly discusses general test system implementation aspects, we will again use the Domain Name System (DNS) example, which was first introduced in Chapter 2 for some more explicit explanations. We restrict ourselves in this chapter to explain the implementation issues for test systems according to the main parts of the TTCN-3 language parts. This means we do not consider the extension packages for test configurations and for real-time testing here. The extension packages contain the definition of operations to implement functionality similar to the one ...
