Interoperability of test procedures between enterprises: Intermediate representation for test procedure exchange

Abstract

The main objective of any test process is to check the functionality, reliability and operational safety of products. Recent developments resulted in a wide range of highly specialized test procedure languages. In addition to the heterogeneity between test procedure languages, the different versions of the same test language are also heterogeneous. To make test procedures exchangeable between enterprises and reusable, testers face the challenging task of effectively decoupling the test procedure descriptions from specific test tools as well as test benches. This paper presents an approach to achieve the interoperability of test procedure languages which envisages an intermediate representation. An appropriate intermediate representation is the enabler for the application of data integration solutions. The goal is to make test procedures interoperable and to enable transformation definitions for cross-compiling. The developed intermediate representation uses the State Machine Notation for Control Abstraction (SCXML) to represent all test procedure language features. The paper demonstrates how to transform a test procedure from Check Case Definition Language (CCDL) into SCXML. Moreover, the capabilities and restrictions of this approach are shown and summarized.