Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3472

412 Axel Belinfante, Lars Frantzen, and Christian Schallhart
sponds to a path from one SDL-state to the following next state. The resulting
test suite is expressed in TTCN.
Summary
TVEDA was successfully applied to several protocol implementations, mostly
specified in SDL. Meanwhile it has partly found it’s way into TestComposer,
which is addressed in section 14.2.14. Most of its underlying empirical principles
were later justified theoretically in terms of well elaborated I/O theories, see
[Pha94b].
Related Papers
• Underlying Theory: [CGPT96, Pha94b]
14.2.8 AsmL Test Tool
Introduction
At the beginning of the nineties the concept of Evolving Algebra came up
due to the work of Yuri Gurevich [Gur94]. He was driven by the ambition to
develop a computation model which is capable of describing any algorithm at its
appropriate abstraction level. Based on simple notions from universal algebra an
algorithm is modeled as an evolution of algebras. The underlying set corresponds
to the machines memory and the algebra transformation is controlled by a small
selection of instructions. Later on Evolving Algebra was renamed to Abstract
State Machine, shortASM. ASMs have been used for defining the semantics
of programming languages and extended in several directions like dealing with
parallelism. See the ASM Homepage [ASMa] for detailed information.
At Microsoft Research a group called Foundations of Software Engineering
[MSF] is developing the Abstract State Machine Language, shortAsmL,
which is a .NET language and therefore embedded into Microsoft’s .NET framework
and development environment. Based on ASMs it is aimed at specifying
systems in an object-oriented manner. AsmL and the .NET framework can be
freely downloaded at [ASMb].
Test Generation Process
AsmL has a conformance test facility included which is based on two steps.
Firstly the specification ASM is transformed into an FSM before subsequently
well known FSM-based algorithms (rural Chinese postman tour, see Part II of
this book) are applied to generate a test suite. The whole testing process is
bounded by the .NET framework, hence the SUT must be written in a .NET
language. The ASM specification is aimed at describing the behavior of the SUT,
abstracting away from implementation details.