User Conference Asia 2009 : Versatile Language

While experts from the testing community shared their knowledge on TTCN-3,

the conference offered a platform to understand the potentials of testing

language in telecom and other verticals

The Testing & Test Control Notation User Conference Asia 2009, on test

specification language TTCN-3, was held in Bengaluru, from November 17-19, 2009,

in reflection of the huge interest shown in the region on this versatile and

powerful software language. The three-day conference organized jointly by the

European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and ISQT, a Bengaluru

based training and consultancy company specializing in software testing and test

automation, registered a huge success with the participants showing enthusiasm

in the tutorials and conferences that ensued in the second and thrid day,

respectively. The conference was inagurated by CP Gangadharaiah, senior VP &

global head, Wipro Testing Services; Prof Dieter Hogrefe, University of

Gottingen, DE; Arunkumar Khannur, chairman & CEO, ISQT; and Jayakishor Bhanja,

program committee chair, ETSI.

Khannur said, "Our overall objective is to bring awareness about what is

happening in the TTCN-3 testing language as only very few vendors have

understood the potentialilty of TTCN-3 in India. Wipro's understanding on the

TTCN-3 potentiality helped share the experience with practitioners here. With

the noble idea of spreading awarness, ETSI and Wipro decided to bring some

awareness on its potentiality. TTCN-3 is used very widely in teleocm. Most

people think that it is only for telecom, but it is much beyond that. ISQT

International wanted to bridge the knowledge gap among the practitioners through

this conference."

Interoperability



The main aim of global standardization is to enable interoperability in a

multi-vendor, multi-network, multi-service environment. With converging

technologies, ICT systems are becoming more and more complex. In his

presentation on 'Achieving Interoperable Standards: The ETSI Approach', Anthony

Wiles, director, Center for Testing and Interoperability, said, "We live in an

interconnected world and interoperability is the key to drive this forward. We

have not only traditional telecoms such as UMTS, LTE and IMS, but also new

developments that include digital homes, smart houses, and intelligent transport

systems. In many cases, the multiple standards that specify these technologies

are often delivered by different standard bodies. This leads to potential cases

of non-interoperability. ETSI believes that validation and testing are the key

tools to deliver interoperable standards and products." ETSI ensures

interoperability standards through specification, validation, and testing.

L to R: Jayakishor Bhanja, Wipro; CP Gangadharaiah, senior VP & global head, Wipro Testing Services, Prof Dieter Hogrefe, University of Gottingen, DE; Arunkumar Khannur, CEO & chairman, ISQT, Organizing Chair

In 2009 ETSI started an EC funded project to study the automation of

interoperability testing of distributed systems. Stephan Schulz, Theofanis

Vassiliou-Gioles in his presentation on 'Automated Interoperability Testing with

TTCN-3', said that interoperability testing is an accepted way to reduce

interoperability problems. Manual interoperability testing is time-consuming and

error prone, and therefore, expensive. Automation can reduce costs by more than

50% compared to manual validation.

He said that their testing approach is not limited to IMS testing only, but

it is broadly applicable. In the context of the project, concepts have been

developed taking other domains such as LTE, WiMax, TETRA, HL7, grid computing,

VoIP in air traffic control, etc, into account as well. In addition, this

approach is also suited for automation of interoperability testing beyond

standardization or interoperability events, for example in the context of

commercial development of distributed systems within the industry.

Automated Target Testing



On automated testing, Bhaskar Rao G of Motorola said that the TTCN-3

approach is flexible to adopt to various features and testing of components

independently. Automation of TTCN-3 test system components and reuse of

framework across test phases are possible with TTCN-3. It offers markable

reduction in time-to-market, and higher productivity. Gaining experiences from

WiMax call processing features, he said that other benefits of TTCN-3 like

standard language for testing, ability to handle configuration, execution and

tracing of test case execution are sure to attract the testing community.

In his presentation on 'TTCN-3 in Wireless Testing EcoSpace', Siddharth

Prasad, associate manager, APSS, Accenture Product Software Solutions, focused

around typical challenges in developing test environment for wireless products

and how TTCN-3 helps to overcome the challenges in an efficient manner. He dwelt

upon scripting language developed by ETSI, which can be for testing across a

spectrum of domains, for example telecom, finance, automotive, etc.

Accenture has the expertise in wireless testing. Using test simulators,

vendors can simulate network environment in the lab to test the device. It helps

the vendors in early detection of bugs before they go to the test houses or

field. Accenture's TTCN-3 expertise is used to develop test scripts on the

simulator for conformance and interoperability testing.

In their joint presentation on 'Managing Regression Suites in Financial

Services (Fund Transfers) using TTCN-3', Bushra Taha, CSTE test analyst, Infosys

and Shri Lekha Panchangam, test engineer, Infosys, tried to explore the

possibility of defining the test methodology and test cases for business

function of fund transfers like wires, ACH check processing, etc, using TTCN-3.

TTCN-3 framework allows us to generate the performance of the project on a

report which can be customized as per the requirement. Usage of TTCN-3 would

significantly benefit the client with more time-to-market because of shorter

test cycles, the cost savings in providing QA services through better

operations, hence, increasing the RoI. Also, its easy to manage the regression

suite with multiple functional and regression cycles, OS upgrades, enhancements

and infrastructure releases. More optimization can be done using model based

testing (MBT) methodology, and various tools provided by vendors.

On the benefits of this testing language, Wipro's Jayakishor Bhanga said that

TTCN-3 can help for timely introduction of VAS, and maintenance of network QoS.

TTCN-3 supports synchronous and asynchronous communication mechanisms, and

supports flexible definition of test data, apart from combining use of ASN.1

with TTCN-3.

LTE Testing



Pranab Dutta of Wipro talked about LTE UE testing and aspects including device
testing lifecycle, applicability of TTCN-3, LTE device conformance testing, etc.

He said, "Equipment vendors and operators will need a clear migration strategy

to move its customer base into LTE. Speed, performance, cost of deployment, and

ease of application development across multiple domains will be the key

parameters for LTE adoption. Also, one big challenge which operators have to

encounter in early times is the interoperability of multiple devices and

equipments from multiple vendors. Thus, testing becomes an important step in the

development of a software intensive system, as it checks the compliance of a

system to end user's requirements."

Protocol conformity testing, and interoperability testing (IOT) are two

significant phases in the lifecycle of LTE device testing. Typically these tests

are executed in third party test labs. Fixing the defects found in the third

party lab is a very expensive and time consuming process. As an alternative,

these tests could be executed in network simulation environment, thereby

reducing cost and time.

The protocol conformity test determines whether the device conforms to the

3GPP specifications. 3GPP defines the LTE protocol conformity test architecture

and has recommended TTCN-3 for test case scripting. TTCN-3 is a defacto testing

language that is supported by ETSI and is widely used to define Abstract Test

Suite or ATS.

Wipro's LTE Tesnovation Center is implementing LTE UE test cases and IOT test

cases using TTCN-3 to reduce testing cycle time and increase efficiency for

equipment vendors, device vendors and operators. Gangadharaiah from Wipro

Testing Services said, "Wipro adopted TTCN-8 years back and started TTCN

initiative in June 2001 by implementing TTCN-2 in SNMP and UMTS. By June 2003,

we started contributing to the 3GPP and also have a significant amount of test

cases written in TTCN-2. In 2007, we developed our own TTCN-3 ecosystem to

suffice the need of our customers. Going forward, Wipro is trying to extend this

framework and use it in banking and security."

Kannan K



kannan@cybermedia.co.in