Market Relevance

Quality has traditionally been the most important competitive factor for European products. For example: the quality reputation of German cars is commonly known and accepted. However, to maintain strong leadership in the software-intensive systems markets, European industry must pay more attention to quality assurance of such systems. One vital task in this is improving the testing practices to enable the continuing high quality of European products together with faster system development. By improving the testing practices in terms of technology and efficiency it is expected that exploitation partners and other European industry will gain significant benefits from the TT-Medal project.

The high overall need for test solutions that are distributed and automated can be deduced from considering the test solution needs of distributed systems, telecommunications and the IT sector. In the telecommunications sector the need for systematic testing has long been accepted, typically around 30%-40% of system development effort is spent in testing. In distributed systems and the IT sector testing is also a major effort, however typically the formal systematic testing methods used in the telecom area have not found favour. This market can only be fulfilled with test solutions that can be integrated into the complete development life cycle.

Currently the market for IT test systems is dominated by a few US based companies, namely Mercury, Compuware, Rational and Seque. Together these companies achieve a market share of 70% of the overall market. Due to fast technology evolutions the market entry barriers are considered as being low, however to be able to enter into this highly competitive market successfully European testing tool manufacturers need to have clear distinctive advantage.

TTCN-3 as the only internationally standardised test notation could provide exactly this competitive advantage to European testing tool manufacturers. But to enter the IT test tool market it is essential that TTCN-3 is integration into the UML framework. One of the focuses of the TT-Medal project was therefore exactly this integration. In parallel to the standardisation efforts tools and methodology was developed so that testing tool manufacturers was able to provide UML compliant TTCN-3 based test tools as soon as the UML 2.0 testing framework was completed.

Only with open and well-defined interfaces between software components of the test system will TTCN-3 be accepted by the IT industry. These well-defined interfaces are especially important in targeting integrated testing environments for software integration (workstation) testing and system (laboratory) testing. They also play a critical role in re-usable test case specification (in TTCN3). Currently these interfaces are not available. Within the project consortium the main players in TTCN-3 tools, Telelogic and Testing Technologies together with a testing instrument and testing system provider, NetHawk was co-operate in this area, i.e. defined common and standardised interfaces. This should increase customers' confidence in the applicability and usability of this new technology.