Colin Willcock

An introduction to the testing and test control notation (TTCN-3)

The testing and test control notation (TTCN-3) is a new test specification and test implementation language that supports all kinds of black-box testing of distributed systems. TTCN-3 was developed in the years 1999 to 2002 at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), as a redesign of the tree and tabular combined notation (TTCN) standard (ITU-T Rec. X.292). TTCN-3 is built from a textual core language that provides interfaces to different data description languages and the possibility of different presentation formats. This makes TTCN-3 quite universal and application independent. TTCN-3 is being published as the ITU-T Rec. Z.140 series. This paper provides an introduction to TTCN-3. This includes an overall view of the TTCN-3 core language, a description of the existing presentation formats, an explanation of the implementation of TTCN-3-based test systems and a discussion about the current usage and the future of the language. The authors all participated in the work within ETSI.

On the Design of the New Testing Language TTCN-3

This paper gives an overview of the main concepts and features of the new testing language TTCN version 3 (TTCN-3). TTCN-3 is a complete new testing language built from a textual core notation on which a number of different presentation formats are possible. This makes TTCN-3 quite universal and application independent. One of the standardised presentation formats is based on the tree and tabular format from previous TTCN versions and another standardised presentation format is based on MSCs. TTCN-3 is a modular language and has a similar look and feel to a typical programming language. However, in addition to the typical programming constructs it contains all the important features necessary to specify test suites.