Driven by technological advances and by an ever-growing need for quality improvements, model-based testing (MBT) has matured in the last decade from a topic of research into an industrial technology. It has been successfully used for the automatic generation of test documentation and test scripts in a wide range of application areas including information and communication technology, information technology, embedded systems and medical systems. This trend is reflected by the availability of multiple commercial grade tools and growing activities around standardization related to MBT. Results in industry show significant gains in productivity, i.e., cutting of testing cost, in particular due to dramatic savings in the test maintenance phase.

TC MTS completed  the work on a first ETSI Standard (ES 202 951) on model-based testing as the result of a joint effort of different stakeholders including MBT tool vendors, major users, service providers and research institutes.

In 2012, STF 442 experimented with the use of commercial MBT tools to generate tests from standards related to the Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). Four different commercial tools were used on three different case studies which successfully generated twelve models with appropriate tests. The results proved that commercial tools can be used in a standardisation setting. TC MTS produced an ETSI Guide (EG 203 130) on MBT in standardised test development, which describes the creation of models for test generation and test selection and defines the process for the development and review of models and generated tests. A Technical Report (TR 103 133) outlining the case studies was also produced.