Case study description

The goal of the case study in the financial sector is to show if and how TTCN-3 is applicable in this domain. Applicability in two areas was considered: 1) the users and their efforts to specify TTCN-3 test cases, and 2) the financial applications and the way an automated TTCN-3 test execution environment can interface with them.

In this case study we have focused our efforts on testing the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) of financial applications. Not only because these are representative of the domain, but also because GUI-testing is a field not much explored yet by the TTCN-3 community. Furthermore, we established integration with TestFrame, a proprietary test language and tool, widely used in the financial testing world.

It is common for testers in the financial domain to take a more end-user-oriented approach. This translates itself into higher abstract test descriptions. Therefore we have chosen to use the TestFrame Language (TFL) as the specification language. We provided a mapping from TFL to the TTCN-3 core notation – this makes TFL a new presentation format. Furthermore, we implemented an automated translator based on these mapping rules.

To communicate with GUI applications we have integrated a GUI test module from TestFrame into the TTCN-3 test execution architecture. We did this by providing it with a TTCN-3 codec and system adapter interface. We have used this combination of TestFrame and TTCN-3 to specify and execute test cases for two applications widely used in the financial world: Globus, a banking application used in 150 banks around the world, and Siebel, a customer relations management application.