TTCN-3Test Suits Generation Approach For Corba Network Management Interfaces

CORBA is one of the mainstream technologies for network management interfaces. Currently, UML is generally used as the protocol-neutral information modeling language in network management domain, and IDL is used as a protocl-specific implementation for CORBA-based interfaces. UML and IDL jointly compose the complete definition of a network management interface. But, the current automatic testing for network mangement interfaces still needs to be improved, especially for function test and semantic test of intefaces, which are most likely relying on manual testing. As a standard test description language, TTCN-3can be used to improve the testing automation degree of network management interfaces.Currently ETSI specifications provided the static mappings from IDL to TTCN-3, which mainly specifies the corresponding declarations of functions and data types in TTCN-3test suites, according to IDL interface definitions. But it does not deal with any mappings for executable test suites. Thus, in order to generate test scripts for CORBA-based network management interfaces based on the curent TTCN-3specifications, more researches are needed for the generation approach for executable test suites.Based on the standard static mappings from IDL to TTCN-3specified by ETSI, this paper proposed a kind of executable TTCN-3testing suits generation method from IDL definitions and UML sequence diagrams, and also provided the generation rules to generate test scripts. This approach first generates the correponding static declarations in test suites according to the IDL defintions, then generates the executeable test case for each interface operation and attribute, at last it generates the combinations of test cases based on time order from the UML sequence diagrams, which forms a complete test suites for network management inteface functions. This paper designed the system structure of theTTCN-3test suits generator, and implemented a prototype system, which canautomatically generate executable TTCN-3test suits for CORBA-based networkmanagement intefaces, thus improving the automation level of funtion andprocess test of management interfaces in a certain degree. The detailedSescnptions of the majoi documents and the main functions in the generator areintroduced in this paper, and the difficulty in programming is also introduced. Asimple example of the generator function verification is given at the end.