Iterative automatic test generation method for telecommunication protocols

Standardized languages used for protocol specification provide an excellent basis for both automatic and manual test generation. Test generation is composed of two steps, the derivation of test cases from the specification, and the selection of the test cases to be included in the final test suite in order to reduce its execution time. This article proposes a new method that aims to decrease the total number of test cases generated automatically by a test derivation algorithm and at the same time to reduce the computation requirements for the test selection procedure. It creates an iteration cycle on the model of evolutionary algorithms, where the test derivation and selection are done simultaneously. In each cycle first a “small” test suite is derived then optimized, evaluated and finally compared to the best suite so far. It is kept as the best suite, if it is found better according to some well-defined evaluation criteria and test suite metrics. This iteration condition is based on the test selection criteria. The article presents an experiment where iterative algorithms are compared to two simple test derivation methods from different aspects.