MTS Activity Report 2018-2019
Chairman: Dirk Tepelmann, Spirent Communications
Responsible for the identification and definition of advanced specification and testing methods, which take advantage of formal approaches and innovative techniques to improve the efficiency and economics of both the description of the standard and the development of associated test specifications.
ETSI’s Methods for Testing and Specification committee (TC MTS) creates standards for testing and specification languages and provides frameworks and methodologies to enable other ETSI committees to produce documents that are easy to understand and easy to use. Its work is therefore critical to the market success of numerous technologies. TC MTS works very closely with ETSI’s Centre for Testing and Interoperability (CTI).
In 2018 we continued the evolution and maintenance of our enormously successful testing language, TTCN-3, along with its tool conformance test suites. Object Oriented features were introduced to TTCN-3 to widen acceptance of the language and also support testing in new areas.
TC MTS appreciated the interest seen in 2018 in the Test Description Language (TDL) - inside and outside ETSI - by a growing user community. The TDL Open Source Project (TOP) as an important driver of TDL provides a toolset for the TDL user community.
TDL fills the gap between the simple expression of what needs to be tested, i.e. the test purposes described in prose or the Test Purpose Language (TPLan), and the concrete coding of executable tests with existing test specification languages such as TTCN-3.
TDL exploits the benefits of model-based software engineering and offers higher quality tests through better design and by making them easier to review by non-testing experts. It is thus improving and accelerating test development without sacrificing quality. TDL will be used primarily for functional testing but could also be used for other types of testing.
In 2018 the mapping of the Test Description Language (TDL) to TTCN-3 was published, serving as a link between the different approaches of TDL and TTCN-3.
Held in Paris in October 2018, the sixth ETSI UCAAT User Conference on Advanced Automated Testing (UCAAT) was organized with the support of TC MTS and the CTI. Under the banner ‘Shaping the landscape of testing’, this successful event gave users, service providers and vendors visibility of cutting-edge testing and automation methodologies across a wide variety of application domains including telecommunications, transportation, healthcare, finance, broadcasting, smart grids, smart cities and the industrial IoT. More than ever, solutions bringing together previously disparate actors and technologies now need to co-exist and interoperate to an unprecedented extent. This, and the increasing presence of AI, whether it be for the use of AI in testing or the testing of AI systems, brings challenges and opportunities to the entire testing community. The conference provided an excellent opportunity to discover, share, learn and challenge modern test automation approaches, technologies and strategies.
LOOK OUT FOR IN 2019 – TC MTS WORK IN PROGRESS:
- ETSI Guide on Methodology for RESTful APIs specifications and testing
- Revision to ETSI Standards (ES) on TTCN-3 extensions: Advanced Matching; Advanced Parameterization; Configuration & Deployment support; revision to parts including core language; using XML schema; Control Interface; Runtime Interface; Use of JSON
- Technical Specification (TS) on TTCN-3 Object Oriented extensions Conformance Test Suite
- TS on test specification for foundational security IoT-Profile
- Technical Report (TR) on IoT security test methodology
- TS on test specification for LoRaWAN security tests
- TS on test specification for Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT)
- TS on test specification for Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP)