Abstract:

The paper reports on the initial experience with practical aspects of conformance testing, gained at the Laboratory of Testing and Verification, Inst. of Telecommunications, with respect to ISDN subscriber signalling protocols (DSS1). Test standardization issues are surveyed. A particular niche application of conformance testing methodology is identified to deal with the case in which standardized test suites are absent and full formality of the testing process is not expected, yet some preliminary results are required quickly. As a tool support for such niche applications, we have put forward a concept of a simple and flexible protocol tester PMM, equipped with internal test generation functions. The design of the experimental PMM tool is briefly discussed. Experiences with testing of four different implementations of the DSS1 network side are reported, for both manually and semi-automatically generated test suites.