ETSI Test Description Language launched at UCAAT conference

Sophia Antipolis, 20 October 2015

The third ETSI User Conference on Advanced Automated Testing - UCAAT 2015, taking place in ETSI headquarters, October 20-22, is the place to discover Test Decription Language, a new language for the specification of test descriptions and the presentation of test execution results.

With guest speakers from ETSI, the industry and academia, a tutorial to learn how to use Test Description Language, and live demonstrations to experience it in practical use, the conference also includes presentations on topics related to automated testing. UCAAT has established itself as a meeting point for testing experts from industry, academia, and standardization.

The wide-scale introduction of model-based testing techniques in an industrial context faces many obstacles. There is a methodology gap between the high-level expression of what needs to be tested, such as the test purposes described in prose or Test Purpose Language (TPLan), and the complex coding of the executable tests in Testing and Test Control Notation version 3 (TTCN-3), a language recognized worldwide also developed in ETSI. Test Description Language fills that gap.

This language represents the next generation of testing languages, exploiting the advantages of model-based software engineering. Test Description Language will offer higher quality tests through better design, seamless integration of methodology and tools, better and faster test development and will be easier to review by non-testing experts.

The introduction of Test Description Language is being driven by industry. It will be used primarily – but not exclusively – for functional testing. The first standard providing a description of the meta-model and the semantics of its elements has been published. Currently the ETSI committee in charge of writing those standards, Methods for Testing and Specification (MTS), is adding the necessary language functionality to integrate Test Description Language into test automation frameworks and to provide Open Source tool support.

To accelerate the adoption of this new language, MTS has commissioned a reference implementation of Test Description Language in order to lower the barrier to entry for both users and tool vendors in getting started with using Test Description Language. A team of experts within the technical committee will demonstrate a preview of the reference implementation which will be made publicly available in the first half of 2016.