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Standardized Formal Methods


It is getting increasingly accepted within a steadily growing range of industrial segments that the only true way for software engineering to achieve higher quality, deliver on time and decrease development costs, is to use formal methods. Furthermore, as the international market grows, equipment from different manufacturers must be able to communicate with each other. Therefore it is obvious that the formal method to be used should be internationally standardized.

There are a number of different formal standardized languages and methods available today. The one you select, however, should fulfill a few more important requirements.

One is the availability of professional development tools. Another is clarity. The notation should be understood by a general audience, from experts to end users. Ideally it should have a graphical syntax.

Formal standardized graphical languages ...

The Test Suite Framework Standard

As the use of standards within the world of Information Technology and Telecommunications has increased tremendously during the last decade, so has the need for methods and tools that support the verification and validation of both the standards and their implementations.

This need has been addressed by ISO and CCITT (ITU-T) in the "Framework and Methodology for Conformance Testing of Implementations of OSI and CCITT Protocols". The framework has now reached the status of an International Standard as ISO/IEC 9646 (or X.290).

Conformance Testing

Conformance testing is the process of verifying that an implementation performs in accordance with a particular standard/specification/environment.

Conformance testing is exclusively concerned with the external behavior of an implementation. Service and functional behavior is tested in order to find logical errors and prerequisites for interoperability. Conformance testing is not intended to be exhaustive and a successfully passed test suite does not imply a 100% guarantee. But it does ensure, with a reasonable degree of confidence, that the implementation is consistent with its specifications, and it does increase the probability that implementations will interwork.

System Testing


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