Mapping C++ Data Types into a Test Specification Language: Master's thesis

Software testing is becoming a more and more important and challenging part of software development nowadays. Since the complexity and size of software is growing day by day, software developers must concentrate increasingly on testing, which costs both time and money. Therefore, different methods and tools have been developed to facilitate and pre-cipitate software testing and also improve the quality of software. One emerging new testing technology is TTCN-3 (Testing and Test Control Notation 3), which is a standardized test specification and implementation language. TTCN-3 pro-vides a broad spectrum of testing abilities and is among others designed for testing soft-ware modules. It is also intended to be used for several applications with several data de-scription languages. Even if C++ is one of the most popular programming languages nowadays, TTCN-3 cannot be yet efficiently utilize for testing C++ software. In order to take advantage of TTCN-3 in testing C++ modules, the interface of the tested component should be defined at the TTCN-3 language level. Therefore, C++ data types need to be mapped to TTCN-3. The purpose of this thesis is to provide data type mappings from C++ to TTCN-3, and to implement a TTCN-3 based test system in order to test a C++ software module. Due to the differences between C++ and TTCN-3, such as lacking of object model in TTCN-3 and ambiguity of C++ pointers, several challenges are faced during this work. However, fairly comprehensive data type mapping is provided, which is finally verified in a real world-like situation by using TTCN-3 to test a C++ module. This example gives a clear insight of the usability and advantage of data type mappings and also valuable experience on the suitability of TTCN-3 in testing C++ software module is gained.