Editorial: Testing practice and research

Comprehensive testing of modern communication systems often requires large and complex test suites, which have to be maintained throughout the system life cycle. Industrial experience, with those written using the standardized Testing and Test Control Notation (TTCN-3), has shown that this maintenance is a non-trivial task and its burden can be reduced by means of appropriate concepts and tool support. To this aim, Motorola has collaborated with the University of Gottingen to develop TRex, an open-source TTCN-3 development environment, which notably provides suitable metrics and refactorings to enable the assessment and automatic restructuring of test suites. This article presents concepts like metrics and refactoring for the quality assurance of TTCN-3 test suites and their implementation provided by the TRex tool. These means make it far easier to construct and maintain TTCN-3 tests that are concise and optimally balanced with respect to maintainability quality characteristics. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This article is an extended version of the paper ‘TRex—The Refactoring and Metrics Tool for TTCN-3 Test Specifications’ by Paul Baker, Dominic Evans, Jens Grabowski, Helmut Neukirchen, and Benjamin Zeiss, which was originally presented at TAIC PART 2006 (Testing: Academic & Industrial Conference—Practice And Research Techniques).

对现代通信系统的全面测试通常需要大型且复杂的测试套件，这些套件必须在整个系统生命周期中维护。是一项非平凡的任务，可以通过适当的概念和工具支持来减少其伯恩。 Gottingen开发TREX是一个开源TTCN-3开发环境，它特别提供了合适的指标和重构，以便能够评估和自动恢复测试套件。 TREX工具提供的套件及其实现。关于可维护性质量特征。 本文是Paul Baker，Dominic Evans，Jens Grabowski，Helmut Neukirchen和Benjamin Zeiss的Paul Baker，Dominic Evans，Dominic Evans，Dominic Evans，Dominic evans和Benjamin Zeiss，最初在TAIC Part 2006（TaiC Part）介绍的Paul Baker，Dominic Evans，Jens Grabowski，Jens Grabowski，Helmut Neukirchen和Benjamin Zeiss，本文是TTCN-3测试规格的重构和指标工具的扩展版本（测试：学术与工业会议 - 实践和研究技术）。