SOFSEM 2002: Theory and Practice of Informatics

In protocol engineering area, conformance testing is a very important step. It tries to detect remaining errors after the verification step. The addition of time in system modeling, makes this step more complicated. This paper aims to give an overview on techniques for conformance testing of timed systems. It first describes some important models used to specify timed systems. Then, it shows the main techniques used for testing such systems. It will focus on two specific techniques. The first one is based on the extraction of a reduced number of test sequences, guided by a property required by any designer (called a test purpose). The second technique is based on the identification of some states on the implementation. The paper also shows how to experiment those test sequences on a real implementation and how to consider time in such an architecture.