Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3472

410 Axel Belinfante, Lars Frantzen, and Christian Schallhart
be separate from the SUT or linked with it. To compile a tester, modules in C,
VHDL (Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language)
and Java are supported. Also the TTCN test suite is translated into one of these
languages. This makes it possible to download a whole test application on a
ROM-emulator and carry out the test in batch mode.
Other extensions comprise additional test strategies extending the ones offered
by the Conformance Kit (partition and transition tour). To do so a test
template language is defined. Such templates correspond basically to regular expressions
over sequences of input actions that are allowed by the FSM when starting
from the initial state. PHACT is not publicly available but several research
groups had access to it and used it to conduct case studies, see e.g. [HFT00].
Testing VHDL Designs
In [MRS + 97] the authors report about a generic approach to use PHACT for
hardware testing. More precisely not real hardware is tested here, but its VHDL
model. VHDL can be simulated and is therefore suited for serving as the SUT.
After a test suite is generated by the Conformance Kit, a generic software layer
is used to interface with the VHDL design. The main problem here is to map
the abstract ingredients of the test cases to the model which consists of complex
signal patterns, ports, etc. The aim of the approach is to automate this mapping
as much as possible. Small protocol examples were used as case studies.
Summary
The Conformance Kit and the tools built upon it such as PHACT made it possible
to do several interesting industrial case studies. Furthermore the PHACT
implementation was used for a comparative case study involving other tools like
TGV and TorX. We return to that in section 14.3.
Related Papers
• Case Studies: [MRS + 97, HFT00]
14.2.7 TVEDA
Introduction
The R&D center of France Telecom [Fra], formerly called CNet, developed the
TVEDA [CGPT96] tool from 1989 to 1995. The final version TVEDA V3 was
released 1995. The main goal was to support automatic conformance testing
of protocols. Not a formal test theory but empirical experience of test design
methodology formed the base of the TVEDA algorithms. Care has also been
taken to let the tool generate well readable and structured TTCN-2 output. The
approaches of TVEDA and TGV (see 14.2.10) have been partially incorporated
into the tool TestComposer (see 14.2.14) which is part of the commercial tool
ObjectGeode from Telelogic [Tel].